40K doesn’t go a long way

i got semi-excited when i got an email the other day…

now, not only was it a ten dollar coupon, but it only required a TWENTY dollar purchase. while most people go nuts and spend a lot more than that on amazon, i have a couple fairly regularly ordered items that hit around that and are kinda small so i figured it would be cool to get one half price. i tried to re-up my rockstars ($20) and budnik’s joint treats ($40) in a cart but it said the coupon code was invalid.

so i tried just one or the other – same issue.

i’ve got a friend with a birthday coming up (tomorrow, actually – happy 50th, t!) so i tried to put something i was getting her through, same issue. (turned out to be a good thing – found it for half the price on eBay)

when hers failed i figured it was because it was one of those “fulfilled by amazon” items. you know the ones. where you’re not actually BUYING from amazon, just paying them for somebody else’s shit. like a garage sale that’s not held in the garage belonging to the person you’re buying from. i guess it’s technically more like a flea market.

same with budnik’s joint treats – sold by the manufacturer, but “fulfilled by amazon”. but my rockstars? those were 100% sold by amazon. they, however, were under twenty bucks ($19.47 with tax). so i grabbed one last thing just to see and got denied, and that’s when i saw something in the small print i hadn’t seen before – “good for the first 40,000 people to respond”. while that’s more than double the population of my town, we live in a world where EVERYBODY has a mobile phone and i bet you’d be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t shop at amazon. 40,000 folks probably responded in the first ten minutes this email was out and i didn’t see it for hours. i’ll bet this plan was doomed from the start.

well, hell…i tried.

it’s just as well…the only lockers that are in my area aren’t the conventional kind. they’re INSIDE brick and mortar businesses, so in 2022 you can order from amazon and relive the days i went through in 1978 whereby you ordered from the sears catalog and then had to go to the counter at the sears store to pick up your shit. this is progress? i’m gonna just pay the extra ten bucks and have my shit brought to me.