Deal or No Deal
Last night the lovely wife and I thought we’d watch a film. After perusing the selection on offer at the local cinema and contemplating $24 for the pleasure to sit in a dark room with sticky chairs we decided to head to the video store instead.
We managed to pick some films surprisingly quickly: one “New Release” (have to return it today) and three weekly hires. The video store has the usual series of specials to try and get you to rent more films, and we fell right between two of them:
- 1 New Release + 2 weeklies = $7.95
- 1 New Release + 4 weeklies = $8.95
“No problem,” I thought, “they’ll charge us $8.95 because we’ve got 3. I can live with that — it’s a lot better deal than $24 for one film.”
“$13.90,” said the young lady behind the counter.
It turns out that the software on their cash register won’t let her give us the $8.95 deal if we don’t have exactly 4 new releases, so it summed it up using the $7.95 deal and then added the cost of the extra weekly.
The solution that works is to go and grab some random weekly off the shelf, pay for the $8.95 deal, and then put the extra weekly in the returns chute on the way out the door. As confirmed by the young lady at the register, that’s the official process.
And no, I can’t go and put the weekly back on the shelf for her — she has to do that.
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