Innocent Bystander

Barnes & Noble's coupons...

When the late, lamented Borders was around, we Borders Rewards members were used to getting an almost-weekly barrage of coupons. It was not unheard of to get 25, 30, even 40% off coupons, week after week.

In retrospect, that probably significantly contributed to the demise of Borders last year.

Barnes and Noble (hereby shortened to B&N for the rest of this article) are a little more miserly with their discount coupons. They come a lot less frequently, often are geared towards a small list of books on sale, and try and push you to their website to use the coupons. I don't like the B&N website. I kinda don't like their stuffy-looking stores either.

But they do one coupon that drives me absolutely bat-shit crazy. It's the one I got today, headlined as a "Surprise Savings to Make You Swoon," because you know, Valentine's Day is coming, and someone still thinks the love puns are timely and cute. (It even had little candy hearts on it.) This coupon offers a discount of up to 50%, but here's the catch...it can be anything from 15% through 20%, 30%, or 50%. But you don't find out until you check out.

If I get a 50% discount, I'm going to buy a much-higher ticket item, like that $35  book I've had my eye on since before the holidays. When you add in my 10% member discount, that $35 book is now only $14.00 or so. If it's 15%, it's $26.25. So in order for me to maximize my savings, I have to schlep up to the checkout counter with a stack of books I want and have the cashier figure out what the discount is and then decide which book to buy based on said discount. The one time I just took the coupon up to the cashier and asked what the discount was, her head--and the cash register--almost exploded from the mental gymnastics required to figure this out without a book being present.

So Mr. Barnes or Mr. Noble--whichever of you  actually reads blog posts by disgruntled, cheap bastards like myself, who are unable to look a gift horse in the mouth and just take the damn discount as offered--please stop doing this. Just send me a coupon where the discount amount is clearly readable and stop making us play Coupon Roulette with books and your cashiers. I am grateful for the discount. Just stop making it so damn difficult to figure out what to buy.

 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Who Played with Fire and Kicked the Hornet's Nest...

I've spent a lot of the past 3 weeks--when not working on a myriad of projects as I enter the nexus of Hell, work-wise--in Sweden. Yes, cold, lovely, semi-hospitable Sweden. No, I haven't been traveling, other than escaping from the noisy neighbors downstairs who seem to think their balcony is actually their living room (even at 2:45am on Thursday morning when the topic of discussion was Broadway shows) and the lousy street musicians across the street by reading Stieg Larsson's wonderful "Millennium Trilogy" of books, featuring the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the anti-social hacker Lisbeth Salander. More on the second and third books later (here's my review of the first book).

So I was sorry to finish the books, even though I was frustrated with parts of both the second and third ones. Larsson had created compelling characters in his two leads, Blomkvist and Salander, and a great roster of secondary characters, too. And the fact that there may--or may not--be a fourth book makes that last page of the third book all the more painful. I also saw the Swedish movie version of the first book (click here for my review of that), which was a close-to-perfect adaptation of a huge book. Oh, those Swedes.

As the buzz on Larsson's books heats up with the impending production of the first American film version--possibly starring Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and god knows who as Salander--Entertainment Weekly throws the whole "Girl" mania up on their cover debuting in mailboxes and newsstands tomorrow (or maybe today, depending on where you live). For me it's a welcome "fix" to my enforced withdrawal from the whole world Larsson so carefully crafted, so I'm hoping my mailman doesn't cop my issue for himself to read for a day or two...