Strange exclusions



  • When I bought my current place, I bought a new stove from Sears and had it delivered on the closing date. Sears is not necessarily the best place for appliances, but it was close and they deliver and take away the old one, so it was just the path of least resistance.

    Sears offers their own warranty on appliances, but their sales gimmick is that if you don't make a claim against the warranty after it expires, you get the value paid for the warranty back in the form of an in-store coupon. Normally I never buy the extra warranties on electronics and whatnot... we all know that they are a scam that is basically pure profit for the store. That said, I have bad luck with things that break and I thought that some time down the road I would probably need a new fridge so I could always use the credit to buy something else. (It turns out that the fridge went about a year too early... so that almost worked out but not quite.)

    The warranty on the stove is now up and I called to get my coupon. I expected many restrictions on how it could be used, but one of them made me go :wtf:

    Prices ending in .97? What's that about?



  • I think that's typically an indication of some special discounted price. Normal prices end in .95 or .99. At least that's my guess.



  • Looks like it's for clearance or discontinued items



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    I think that's typically an indication of some special discounted price. Normal prices end in .95 or .99. At least that's my guess.

    Yup. I worked at a store that used .44 and .88 to indicate a special price that was not eligible for other discounts.

    That being said, wording the coupon as "excludes items with prices ending in .97" instead of "excludes clearance/deep discount items" (substitute the appropriate store jargon as necessary) is a bit of a WTF.



  • @Jaime said:

    Yup. I worked at a store that used .44 and .88 to indicate a special price that was not eligible for other discounts.

    Interesting.

    I wonder how many POS systems have .97 or other similar prices hard-coded into them as business rules for discounts or not eligible for discounts!



  • Their computer system uses .97 cents as a marker for discontinued items.

    OfficeMax, back when I was doing shit retail work, does the same thing. And IIRC prices ending in .47 were "written off" (basically "sell these off for whatever, we just want them gone"). Employees kept a look at the price change lists to get first dibs on the .47 items. Which was fine, because their employee discount was a paltry 5%, fucking cheap-asses-- 5% doesn't even cover sales tax!

    For years I worked on a computer desk (slightly damaged) I bought for $4.47 from OfficeMax. And it took like 10 years to use-up all the cheap AA batteries I got that way.


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