They don't call me a great man
for nothing.
In fact, they charge me quite a bit!
It'd be easy to blame it on changes in the book industry. Amazon is selling 115 Kindle books for each 100 paperbacks, and the Kindle reader itself is Amazon's single best-selling product. I downloaded the Kindle software to my PC - it's free - and it's incredibly appealing. Reading on a monitor is hard to do, but I suspect I'd fall in love with reading on a handheld Kindle. On the other hand, maybe there's another problem at Border's. The illustration here is clipped from the screenshot of an email Border Book mailed me overnight. (Incidently, you might note that today's date is two, eleven, two eleven.) A Simple CalculationIf you apply a 40% off coupon to a one-dollar item, you pay sixth cents. That's exactly sixty cents, no round-off errors. Now apply another 10% off coupon to the sixty cents. The price is now fifty four cents, exactly, with again, no round-off errors. That means a 40% off and a 10% coupon amount to precisely 46% off. That is, if you pay 54 cents on the dollar, you're saving the other 46 cents. When you were in high school, taking Algebra, half the kids in the class were saying, "What's the point in learning this, I'll never use it." Turns out the kids that said this ended up at Border Books. And soon, they'll be at the federal courthouse, filing bankruptcy papers. Sad. Other Bloggers On Related Topics: |
|||
|
|
Several years ago, I
Several years ago, I purchased a couple of tie pins from a rack that was marked as 25% off. The kid who rang me up was wearing headphones that prevented him from hearing me tell him about the discount that he neglected to apply. Only after refusing to hand him my money did he pull one of the speakers from his ear to hear me tell him about the discount. He said "cool", went back to his music, hit the 25% discount key twice (because I had two pins!), and charged me half price for the purchase.
There was no moral dillema here for me, as I believe that this kind of stupidity not only allows one to take advantage but actually demands it. The only difficult part was keeping a straight face and resisting the urge to go back later and buy three or four more pins from the same guy to see if he would finally figure it out.