I received a “Come Back. We Miss You.” discount coupon from a major technical book publisher. They said that I could get 40% off my total purchase. Great, I thought. They wanted to incent me to buy some books (IOW spend some money with them) that I wouldn’t otherwise have done without the discount coupon. This would have worked, but didn’t.
As many programmers I have two list of books. One is the list of books I want/need. I purchase these books (yes, often with discounts) because I am willing to part with my cash for them. Then there is the second list of books. These books I might like to get, but aren’t willing it purchase because there are other things that would give me better value/return for my money. However, I can be persuaded to purchase the items on the second list if I get a deeper-than-normal discount. I thought I had received an offer of the latter type. Turns out I was wrong.
Here’s the deal. This publisher sells print and ebook versions of their titles. If you purchase both at the same time, you get a significant discount on the ebook. For example, $44.99 for print, $35.99 for ebook, or buy the $44.99 print version and for $4.50 more, you can get the ebook. Basically add 10% to get the ebook bundled. I put 4 print+ebook bundles in my shopping cart. That totaled $159.46. I expected to be able to use my 40% coupon and get that for $95.68. That’s a great price and would push me to purchase close to $100 worth of merchandise from this vendor that I wouldn’t have otherwise spent.
But that is not the case. Why? When I added the discount code they un-bundled the ebook from the print book. This meant that I got 40% off the non-bundled (i.e. $44.99 + $35.99) price instead of the bundled price ($49.49). This meant that instead of $95.68 my cost would be $158.95. Significantly higher and only a 0.3% discount.
I didn’t make the purchase and they lost $95.68 that I was ready to give them.
Am I being greedy? I’d like to hear your thoughts?
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