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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27297 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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I was at my local organic co-op today, and I discovered that they have, as is typical of hippy-dippy stores, a reusable bag policy. In this case, every reusable bag I use, up to four total bags, gets me a small discount.

Being the sort of person who posts on the Motte, I immediately thought of gaming this system by putting as few items as possible in each bag. Preferably, I would buy four items, put one item in each bag, walk the bags out to my car, deposit the items in a separate container, then go back inside and repeat the cycle as often as necessary to get everything I want and maximize the discount.

This is, of course, both strictly legal under the store’s very poorly written policy, and also going to get me banned in no time.

But it led me to think of the deeper issue. Many, perhaps all, policies and laws are prone to extreme lawyer-brain galactic thinking like this. Imagine that the store couldn’t just ban me, because I am a member of the store and they can’t just get rid of me, and they must also put in place a policy that is fair to every member of the store. So they start trying to specify the volume of bag that must be filled, the types and sizes of bags that are allowed, minimum item counts in each bag. Soon, cashiers are bogged down in the minutiae of various arcane bag to discount ratios, rather than just scanning items and making pleasant small talk. Everyone is worse off, and the only plausible escape is to eliminate the discount itself, thus taking away a benefit of being a store member and reducing the overall value of that status, causing long-term harm to the store’s “health,” as it were.

Fortunately for my local Hippy Mart, they can still keep a FAFO policy in place for the chronically politically diseased such as myself. Anyways, I was just thinking about this and the contrast with the American legal system, which would be obviously incapable of maintaining such a simple and poorly written policy for longer than a nanosecond or two.

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.

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