This weekend, amidst all of the travel and adventure, there were a few mundane tasks to be done. Certainly the most mundane of all was buying toilet paper. We had a coupon to get two 12-roll packs of Angel Soft bathroom tissue from Walgreen’s for just $5! That’s just $0.21 per roll! Quite a bargain, and not one we could pass up.
So we went into Walgreens with the coupon, only to discover that the particular brand of toilet paper was sold out! Oh no! What to do? Since it was the last day of the coupon’s validity, we decided to get a rain check. This would enable us to come back in when the product was in stock, and receive it for the same sale price. At the cash register, however, I had an interesting encounter with a teen-aged cashier:
Cashier: Rain check?
Me: Yes, please.
Cashier: Ok. Starts filling out a slip of paperwork. How old are you?
Me: Huh?
Cashier: Only old people get rain checks!
Me: I’m 25, that’s not old!
What is so wrong with wanting to save money? Are all consumers our age expected to buy the most expensive, heavily marketed products at full retail price? Why, I tell you, kids these days, with their hair and their clothes and their hippity-hop music…
You know, that’s a pretty good deal — $0.21 / per roll is about 0.01 cents per sheet (assuming 200 sheets per roll). Not bad by today’s standards, but when I was your age, we didn’t even have toilet paper. And we liked it, see…?
Your experience with Walgreen’s is probably not atypical. In Florida, there is a provision for rainchecks as a counter to “bait and switch”.Unfortunately, one can experience the raincheck problem (i.e. a lack of advertised goods in the stores) at many retail outlets.
Regards, ABV