32542% Percent off!!!!11

So I went to the mall with the wife when we were in ken-tuck-ee. And we went in one of those lovely women’s clothing stores, New York & Co. to be exact. And what I discovered therein was quite entertaining. You see, in an attempt to drive sales and perhaps trick people into spending more, the sales have gotten quite abit more complicated. No longer are sales like “Save 20% off the marked price!” or “This item: 29.99!”… nooo we have stuff like:

- “Save 30$ on your purchase of 75 or more”
- “For every 30$ you spend, you get a coupon for 15$ off, only usable on two days, and only one coupon usable for every 30$ you spend those two days!” (not making that up).
- “Buy two of any sweater, get one sweater free!”
- “Buy ___ item, get one more of that item half off!”

The net result of all this is alot of maths taking place. It also means that if you optimize your purchases, it’s not too difficult to get roughly 50% off the marked retail price. Which leads my cynical mind to assume that they basically double the price of everything, assume you’ll get 50% off, and still make a healthy margin when you do. This means those who aren’t willing to stack deals and coupons will pay way too much, and the store’s fine with that too.

What I’m wondering is how the best way to truly pwn them at their own game is. It seems, if you bought things on clearance that had a buy x get x free sale, with a coupon for x dollars off a y dollar purchase, you could quite possibly pay less than their cost. But who knows, perhaps their cost is way lower than I’m assuming. Oh well.

FL: Nearly half of lung cancer surgery patients resume smoking – not really funny at all, but at least intriguing. Seems like treating the symptom and ignoring the problem still doesn’t work.