The Soapbox Archives:
I was shopping at Home Depot the other day and was in line to check out.
The people in front of me, a family of three, paid and left.
....and left their shopping cart at the register...in front of me. I was so dumbfounded that I couldn't say anything until they had gotten away. Even the cashier was blown away. If there no limit as to how asinine people can be? I wanted to tell those people that they must be really crappy parents if they're teaching their kids that it's okay to not have to put things away where they found them because someone else will do it for them.
Last week we were walking through another store ("Store B") and walked by what we thought was the same stove at a much lower price. And it was on sale. (The first stove was a "slide-in" while the second was a "standalone" so they weren't the same stove) The standalone stove cost about two thirds of the slide-in stove (same functionality) and we figured the slide-in stove wasn't worth that kind of money unless we hit the lottery. So we went back and bought the standalone stove the next night and the sales person gave us a price that was even lower than the advertised sale price (wahoo!). We were estatic over our new purchases (my old stove was at least 30 years old, maybe older).
Yesterday we happened to be in yet another store ("Store C") across the street from Store B where we bought the stove and saw the same exact stove for $221 less than what we had paid ($389 less than the marked sale price at Store B). Our jaws dropped. We had overpaid. Big time. All of a sudden, our nice shiny new stove wasn't as wonderful as we had thought.
I was feeling bad about our purchase and went back to Store B to argue for a rebate. Even worse, when we decided to go back to our store where we bought the stove, the sale price was now $388 less than the sale price 7 days ago. We went to their customer service desk and we showed them the price we had paid only a week ago and what the current in-store price was. And they cheerfully refunded the difference. Now we were excited about our new stove again.
Bottom line: