Irony

Getting free coupons to shop in inflationary times is almost like getting twice the mileage from your car! Imagine my happiness when my mother presented me gift vouchers worth Rs. 1500 that could be redeemed at a fancy lifestyle store. Now you might argue that what hell could come in that much money but in my case this retail adventure could end up meaning clothes for an entire season.

I'm not your average Project Runway reject but I can dress. No. I'm not really the white T-Shirt and blue jeans kinda guy. In any case anything white in this day and age isn’t a god idea! I’m usually the plain round neck t shirt and jeans kind of person. So fifteen hundred bucks transform into a lot of t shirts.

In case you have been closely following NASA’s Mars odyssey, you’d have noticed the SALE signs on every shop. One thing I can’t fathom and have previously blogged about as well, is why the hell people over price their products and then give a discount. This used to be the standard practice in Karol Bagh or Sarojini Nagar. It turns out that the notion of the world becoming a village is indeed true. I took my coupons and entered the domain of retail therapy. Imagine my utter surprise when everything was on sale. I managed to reach the joint in good time as it was the last day of the coupon’s validity. So far so good. But these coupons wouldn’t be effective on items on sale.

What?

So I searched the three floors of the shop to find something that would be (a) covered by the coupons and more importantly (b) be of any use to me! I looked at the men’s section; everything was on sale ranging from 10% to a whopping 80%! Off I went to the household section. Different floor, same results. I searched every where and nothing had escaped the sale- lamp shades, soaps, perfumes, sunglasses, baby diapers, cutlery, you name it and the darn thing was on sale.

I love a challenge and but this was stupid. Being an average middle class Indian I just could let go of the free coupons. Finally I did manage to buy goods worth Rs. 1473/- but if anyone saw what ultimately accompanied me out of the shop, they’d not be able to understand anything about the pattern. Three days into it and I'm still thinking how the hell does one pick up a travel kit with a neck pillow and eye patch, three bars of organic soap, a set of three socks, a navy blue crew T-Shirt and a bread baking dish!

What a double whammy these free coupons turned out to be....

A traffic jam when you're already late
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife
And isn't it ironic...dontcha think
A little too ironic...and yeah I really do think.

Ironic- Alanis Morissette

SALE! SALE!! SALE!!!

We all are used to laws ruling our lives. There are some that work for us (if you ever find any, call me!) and then there are some as serious as a heart attack that will clean up the mess (only if they were applicable) and then there are some that are meant to be broken (most of them and counting).

Can laws that seemingly curb freedom of any kind actually do us good?

If you visit any shopping complex or mall in Delhi, a signboard loudly proclaiming SALE greets us. Be it Sarojini Nagar or Select Citywalk Mall, the simple law of land seems to be, ‘Have Shop, Will Be on Sale’. The Europeans, especially the French, have an absurd law that allows shops of any kind to put things on sale only twice a year.

Yeah you heard me right.

As a matter of fact in countries such as Belgium and France you can’t even put tags like ‘Buy One Get One Free’, ‘Discounted Price’ or anything that conveys that the customer might have to pay less than what is on the tag. Apparently this has its foundation in some old Nazi law that wanted to curb the enthusiasm of Jewish shopkeepers who came up new and innovative ways to attract people. They worked on the principle that if some one came in to buy a particular thing at a discounted price, they could be siphoned off more stuff at original price.

If you think that we Indians often bemoan about our thought process deeply rooted in some tradition that barely makes sense to us in this and age, then lament no more for the West is equally stuck in some time wrap. Here are highly progressed nations that think about the common consumer’s benefits only twice a year. You could be a French national and your shop could be empty all through the year or you might want to have a clearance sale to get out of the business or perhaps the municipal authorities on the orders of the courts could be sealing your shops so you might want to get rid of the good looking stuff at any price to cut some losses but you won’t be allowed to do any such thing.

Surely it can’t be that bad? Really?

The Europeans still follow these rules and they state that this way the Davids’ (small shops) can take on Goliaths (big plush showrooms that in any case have a million mark-ups).

Like Bill Murray who realizes in Groundhog Day that if you continue to relive your worst day then after a point you actually start liking it, maybe being stuck in some time wrap can actually be good. Imagine you could actually buy something for what’s it worth rather than getting attracted to multi-colored stickers that offer discounts on tanked-up prices. After all aren’t we different from the French for we have the same shops in three malls (and more in the offing) in a radius of one kilometer that stock the same things and have the same over-priced tags on them and yet people buy it?

Of course, we also have other important issues to worry about like being able to find parking in these modern marvels.

Thanks to S for forwarding the link on European Sale Laws.

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