Nonsense numbers

[come_to_think]

I decided I wanted a more powerful fan than the one now sitting in my window.  So, how powerful is that fan?  With some effort, I found, embossed white on white in an obscure part of the housing, the current it draws: 0.68 A.  (No such information on the instruction sheet.)  Of the suppliers brought up by Google, only a tiny minority provided that information, either in amperes or in watts or in horsepower.  At length, however, I found one that offered 1.9 A input (if that's what "Max High" means) and 1/5 hp output.  It also told me

$70.45
Retail Price: $86.55
You save: 19%

Another supplier, one that I use frequently, offered the identical fan with the "information"

List Price: $120.00
Price: $91.89
You Save: $28.11 (23%)

Naturally, I chose the one with the smaller saving.  However, a little of my money went to pay someone to sit at a desk & make up phony prices & phony discounts.  Likewise, when I go to a supermarket, willy nilly I help pay the salaries of people who insult me by putting up signs that say "Buy One --- Get One Free", insinuating (not seriously, of course) that I go shopping in the hope of getting something for nothing.

Why don't those people climb into Dumpsters & tie themselves in plastic bags?

Comments

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

In the grocery today I noticed some just-add-water Indian-style dinners that had BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE printed on the box as part of the usual packaging.

[come-to-think.livejournal.com]

I should have ordered it from Amazon. After a couple of weeks, I ventured to ask S&J when I would get the fan, and was told it would ship on 2 August. They didn't. After a little more badgering, they said they were shipping it. UPS tried to deliver it yesterday, but I was at the dentist having a crown glued back in. The delivery man didn't leave a note, but I found out about it on the UPS Web site. The fan arrived today -- 1 min before I was leaving for a date.

I did the EE right, anyway -- it is indeed much more powerful than the old one.