Nothing to Sneeze At

Posted on March 8, 2014 under Storytelling with one comment

OPBD

 

Admit it.  It’s hard to resist a sale on toilet paper.

We’re always on the lookout for a bargain and will go to great lengths to acquire our just rewards.  Loyalty cards are all the rage these days and just about every large business offers them to attract new customers and keep old ones.  Paying a price for loyalty is not a new concept.

When I was a kid, collecting Nesbitt Orange bottle caps would get you into the movie theatre.  How about IGA stamps?  And if your teeth didn’t rot out in the pursuit, you could collect enough Popsicle sticks to get swag from the Popsicle Pete catalogue.  Gold bond stamps, anyone?  And you thought we were bored back in the ‘60s.

A sale day for a retail outlet is something straight out of Dante’s Inferno.  It is akin to the last day of RRSP season for financial institutions.  Or the deadline for filing income tax returns if you are a tax preparer.  Let’s call it “Hell on Earth”.

They say that it is human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain.  But sometimes, through bad luck or bad timing, we find ourselves sucked into the vortex of something beyond our control.

Something like Optimum Points Bonus Day (OPBD).  Sounds like some kind of disorder.

The young male clerk, seeking to climb the ladder of success, started on the bottom rung as a trainee.  Talk about baptism by fire.  On only his third day on the job he faced a store-wide sale.  He was nattily attired leaving the house, hardly worth the effort considering he would have to change into store-issued garb before heading out onto the firing line. He even applied a dash of hairspray to keep his wavy blond hair looking just so.

The deal on this particular day was straightforward enough: spend $75 on almost anything in the store and get 18,500 bonus points. Using the Optimum calculator, that amounts to about $25, or the equivalent of a large pizza with the works.

There was the posted “limit of 6 items” clearly advertised on sale racks throughout the store.

A member of my family found herself in the checkout line on OPBD, and ahead of her were two silver haired octogenarians.  There appeared to be some problems brewing between them and the young clerk behind the counter.  They had obviously planned their strategy long before entering the store.  Each had shopping carts filled to overflowing, and even a casual observer could tell that they had exceeded some of the advertised limits.

It only took about five minutes to send the novice clerk into a frenzy.  They were either trying to combine their existing points or attempting to ring in multiple purchases using some form of the Pythagorean Theorem.  Whichever way you cut it, they had a carefully manufactured scam going and they were “playing to win”.

They were an effective duo, each not more than five feet tall, smiling and pleasant the whole time (a tactic learned over four score and seven years). They sucked the life out of the clerk like a pair of malnourished boa constrictors.

Much wheeling and dealing later, the weary (and now limp haired) clerk gave in to their demands.

As the triumphant twosome headed for the exit, the clerk took a tissue from the box of Kleenex under the counter and gave a gentle wave of surrender.