Thursday, January 7, 2010

wherein madness ensues

Just five days ago I blogged about losing my husband in Europe’s largest electronics store and if it were not for work I doubt I would have him back by now.

See, said electronics store currently has a promotion whereby every tenth purchase is free. Yes, you read that right. F R E E.

The way it works is this. You buy any item(s), you pay for it and take it home. Every night at 10:30 pm they draw a number from 0-9. If the number drawn is the last one in a row of consecutive numbers on your receipt, you can take your receipt to the store and get your money back. Sounds pretty great. And I am sure it is but this is where the husband and I start to disagree.

See my husband is never one to pass up the opportunity for a great deal. I on the other hand couldn’t care less about advertisements, special offers or deals. Three shampoos for the price of one? Wasted on me. I am pretty sure that I only need the one shampoo for the moment and it will last me a while. And who knows if I want the same shampoo again when I’m done with it??? So I only buy what I need.

Sure if I could have my Nikon D3, worth approximately $6,000 and not having to pay for it, that would be totally awesome. But going into town, finding a parking space, fighting with 500.000 other people over the goods, then not winning and having to drag that stuff back to the store and get get in line to return it? Not happening with me. The husband on the other hand has no problem with that. He happily bought and brought the stuff back when his number wasn’t drawn. His brother won something, which only incited more.

Granted, the offer is no hoax and every tenth customer does get reimbursed and if I could muster up enough energy to round up ten friends to spend $ 6,000 each and stand in the same line with me at the cash register, and tell nine to go back to the store to return the stuff, that would be cool but hey, do I really need that camera? I guess not.

What’s your thought on it? If you didn’t really need anything would you still go on the mad shopping spree?

Btw. the hubby reported that while in the beginning the staff would happily take back the items if you didn’t win, they are now growing really tired of it :). Who would’ve thought???

The promotion runs until January 09th…Good luck to all the folks. I’ll be hanging out at home, enjoying the madness from a safe distance.

4 comments:

Danielle Athanas said...

That really is insane. While I love a good deal, I am not one to get into crazy things like this. Yeesh.

Melisa Wells said...

I'm with you. Let's stay home and cook some spätzle instead.

Brian o vretanos said...

I'm not very motivated by special offers - you can end up spending more money, which I suppose is the point.

I hope the shop has done its research and accurately worked out how many people will do what your husband's doing, and it'd be interesting to know just how much more than 10% people like him will cost them - after all if everyone returned their non winning items the shop would make zero money, so they're taking a bit of a risk with this sort of stunt...

Jen said...

That is crazy. I would never have the patience for it. I feel kinda bad for the store employees! LOL!