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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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I suspect that the discount is so small that it wouldn't be worth the time for 99%+ of their shoppers.
However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.

My brother was buying an expensive pair of shoes (over $100), when the sales guy pointed to their special of Buy-One-Get-50%-Off-Second. My brother asked if he gets to choose which pair of shoes counted as second, and the sales guy agreed. My brother then asked for the cheapest pair of shoes in the store, which turned out to be women's $10 house slippers. So he bought those first, and then got 50% off for his expensive pair of shoes.

Ironically, the expensive pair of shoes wore out in a year, but my sister-in-law still wears the slippers.

However, you are correct that, on occasion, businesses don't think their promos through.

Sometimes even for permanent ones. An example I ran into yesterday was that the Steinberg Cubase Pro DAW costs 575e to buy. However the combination of their cheapest audio interface (IXO12 at 49e) that comes with the lite version Cubase AI and upgrade from AI to Pro (279e) ends up costing barely over half that and you get an audio interface you can give to a friend. Those deals have been in effect for over a year or longer.

For some reason this reminds me of this joke but inverted. The day they think trough the promotion their sales will plumet.

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you." The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want, son?" The boy takes the quarters and leaves. "What did I tell you?" said the barber. "That kid never learns!" Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream parlor. "Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?" The boy licked his cone and replied: "Because the day I take the dollar the game is over!"

I have never seen a store that didn't make the less expensive item the discounted one in a BOGO sale.

Its a fairly common thing with glasses due to the very large per unit margins for the frames. There might be some restrictions but you can often get a much more expensive item discounted.