What Just Happened Here?

This is one of those stories that may not translate well on a blog but I’ll do my best.

Last week I went to Chapters and bought a book that Brad and I have been wanting for a while but as I was leaving I remembered we still had a gift card to Chapters that we haven’t used, darn. We don’t buy books very often so now is a good time to use it. I didn’t have to card with me so a couple days later Brad and I decided to go back with card in hand.

The plan was to return the book and then re-buy it using our handy gift card, easy right? As we were standing in line we saw a cd that I wanted so we added that to the pile, slightly complicating things since the gift card now won’t cover the entire purchase, we’ll just give them some extra cash though.

So we get called up to the counter and we explain to the very nice man what we want and he’s on board says he’ll just need to get authorization to make the return (he seemed really new). His manager happened to be standing right beside him so he heard the story and said rather than do a difficult return how about he just gives us an additional $5 in store credit and we call it even. We agree immediately as it seems like a great idea, we make our purchase and leave.

And then we start to wonder... wait a minute, what just happened in there? Cause when you think about it, it doesn’t actually make any sense.

Goal: Use our gift card, not our bank account to pay for the previously purchased book.

Result: We got $5 off a cd.

The manager must not have understood what we were wanting to do, or perhaps he wanted to get rid of us, either way we figure we’ll take the book back and try again. Maybe we’ll have better luck this time.
L