Friday, December 09, 2005

I'm a Ho...

a Free Shipping Ho, that is.

The first step to recovery is admission that you have a problem. I have a problem. I cannot resist the lure of "free shipping". I will do anything for free shipping.

Evidenced the other day as I was doing some holiday shopping on Amazon.com. They offer "Super Saver Shipping" (read as: FREE!) for orders over $25. Since I had about five items each to buy for two nieces, this should have been no problemo. However....

The "Super Saver Shipping" only applied to items that Amazon.com sells themselves. The key word being "themselves". For example, when you buy a toy from Amazon.com, the supplier is actually Toys R Us, not Amazon. Thus, no free shipping for that item. Drat!

Also, when you buy something as "used" from Amazon.com, that does not apply for the free shipping. Double Drat!

So, I found myself needing one purchase of $12.59 to qualify for the free shipping. I decided to buy one more book (horse-related, naturally...these are my horse-crazy nieces, after all). Guess how much the book was? $12.35! A frigging 24 cents short! Not even a quarter short. I added it to my order and the damn site actually told me, "you need .24 to qualify for Super Saver Shipping". Oh, bite my jingle bells! Just give me the quarter, for crying out loud!

So, what did I do?

Did I just place the damn order and get on with my life? No way, Jose.

I asked Loving Husband, "Do you need anything from Amazon.com?" Surprisingly, he didn't need anything. When he finally thought of several things, they were (of course!) not qualified for the fucking free shipping. Triple Drat!

"Does Goofy Junior need anything from Amazon.com?" Of course not. Junior has more "stuff" than the entire household combined, thanks to Junior-centric Gramma and Grampa.

I spend ONE HOUR of my precious life, trying to spend 24 cents. And having a hard time doing it!

Finally Loving Husband came up with the perfect plan. "How about a sticker book?"

"A sticker book!!!" Hallelujah! It was $1.25.

The final tally? I saved $5.29 in shipping.

I told you...I'm a Free Shipping Ho.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stay away from Overstock - even when it's not free, it's like $2.95 to ship FURNITURE.

Cagey (Kelli Oliver George) said...

I did something very similar at Gymboree yesterday - the whole needing to "spend in order to save". You're not the only sucker! But damn straight, my kid will be dressed to the nines.

karen! said...

I loved that story! Nice site. I'm not sure how I got here. I have just been clicking from one site to another. I linked to you from someone else that I linked to from another someone and so on.