Thursday, July 30, 2009

Er, you dint say that

Experience one:
I walked into a grocery store the other day, the usual weekly visit. I picked up some biscuits and toiletries. Then, I went to the deodorant section and noticed a bright label saying "buy 2 get 20% off". I thought that was cool. I picked up an orange color and a silver color (they were flavors that pleased me a little). After waiting in the long queue for billing, I got the things billed. Strangely I noticed in the bill, both the deodorants were billed in the actual selling price. Annoyed and tired, I walked to the guy in the billing section and asked him to reason out for the 20% discount that was missing. He wittily replied back,"Its only when you take both in the same flavor". WTH.

Experience two:
One would have seen the latest Airtel ad were a girl and her friends save a paper boat to float in heavy rain. Its for their new connection plan called, "Special 5". I read the specification of the plan in the website and it was good when compared to the corporate plan I hold. I then called up customer care to change my plan. Swiftly she replied back, "Sir its not available for corporate plan holders". WTH++.

Later one of my colleague walks to my place and says, Did you know there is a per day rental of Rs 1 for each of the numbers you add as part of the Special 5 plan. So its like Rs 5 per day! Whooot! Then went back to airtel.in again to find there is a faq section (yeah, you read that right :)) that says about the rental charges. WTH++.

The whole point here is, its sick of these brands to do this kind of false marketing. Letting the customers know only the nice side of it in big banners with a small * sign at the end of each line and its left to them to explore the ugly side of it. These leeches will not let you go unless they are happy. So lesson here is to change oneself to be super smart when you spend on things.

3 comments:

Amudhan said...

Funny and sad... It is at least okay if this happens for grocery items and toiletries... it happens for government which gives false promises, is what most saddening.

Anonymous said...

Tch tch tch

Vijesh said...

@Amudhan
yeah, just the number of zero's differ in both the cases. In the later its like 00,00,000 :)

@revs
Yes come in. How may I help you?