a Friendly Fail
August 16, 2009 pm31 6:56 pm
At a truck stop outside Cleveland, Texas, I bring up a snack and a 20 oz bottle of Ozarkana water. Cashier tells me the water is two for a dollar.
That’s ok, just want one. How much is it?
$1.09
I ask her to charge me for two.
I should have gone back to the case and taken a picture, but I wasn’t going to the car to dig out a camera. That’s the first time in my life I regretted not having a camera-phone.
Not as good as what they find at 360, but still a fail.
JD2718 
Priceless!
I don’t get it. It’s often cheaper to buy in bulk. Its an incentive to buy two bottles.
Am I missing something here?
Bring me back some of the cheap Texas water! A teacher from Toronto told me that: a) they reach top salary in 10 years, b) they get reviewed every 5 years, but don’t even get observed in-between c)the can take a year off at full pay d)they get 6 months maternity leave and most importantly the standarized tests are sent off to be graded!
Just to clarify, the Toronto teacher was talking about teachers in Canada, not Texas, right?
Jack,
There’s got to be a hidden catch because it can’t be that good in the Lone Star State! Or did teachers get these bevvy benefits since Rod Paige isn’t there anymore?
I don’t think that’s a real “fail”. It’s normal at some stores to have a “2-fer” special where you have to buy 2 to get the discount price. They got you to buy two instead of just one, right?
Perhaps not a fail. But a mistake. Two for a dollar and one for 99 cents, that would have been more like it…
I misread it as two for two dollars, in which case one for 1.09 is sensible. Two for one dollar and one for 1.09 is quite silly :)
I suspect people are misreading as “two for a dollar each”, JD?
This used to be fairly common on the railways here. It’s perfectly normal for a single ticket on a local journey to be, say, £4, and a return to be £4.30 or so – but every so often you’d get a conversation such as this.
You: single to Rochdale please (this is where I was going when I first encountered this)
They: return to Rochdale, sir?
You: no, single.
They: I think you’d like a return, sir.
You: why?
They: well, a single’s £4.40 and a return’s £2.20, sir.
You: care to explain that?
They: would if I could, sir. Return ticket, sir?
You: yes please!
I think there’s a similar story in a Bill Bryson book somewhere.
Rick, I think you are correct.
“would if I could, sir”
Cute.
Monday was hot as the dickens here and we don’t have AC, so TwoPi and I went to the cheapo movie theater to the longest movie we could find (Angels and Demons, at a cool 138 minutes plus previews). It cost us $2 each, for a total of $4.
But as we paid we discovered that Mondays are a special, where if you have 3 or more people it’s only 50 cents each. So if we’d gone ahead and bought a third ticket for an invisible friend, we could have saved 50 cents.
Whoops, I mean saved $2.50. We’d have saved 50 cents off the price of a ticket for ONE.