Friday, June 06, 2008

Everything's Blatantly Overpriced, But You Get to Scratch Something

I went to Video Games Live last night! It was, er... mixed. Had its ups and downs. You know.

I'll be providing you guys with a full and comprehensive piece on the event, both for the pre-show goings-on and for the show itself -- but that will be up tomorrow night. No, not tonight; tonight, I have come to gloat.



Ha! Ha! It is possible to win on one of these miserable things! The day-olds I've just bought will taste ever the sweeter knowing that they heralded my victory!

If you've bought anything at all at a Safeway recently, you've no doubt received one of these faux-lottery scratch ticket things. And you didn't win anything from it! No, sir, no you did not. That's the outstanding consensus I've heard from everybody who has seen one while I'm in earshot; literally nobody that I've ran into has won anything on this latest batch of uninspired customer-loyalty grabs. (Mind you, at least these ones aren't based on Texas Hold 'Em. What was with that?)

Much like the Roll Up the Rim odds, anecdotal evidence would indicate that Safeway has been cutting back dramatically on the chances of anybody winning any prizes. These are lean times, after all! The rising costs of construction mean that Safeway already blew its entire promotional budget on their widespread and awful 'lifestyle store' renovations, so there's no money left this quarter to actually give anything out.

The 'game', such as it is, is structured so that the player will scratch the designated spaces in numerical order to build anticipation towards the thrill of unearthing a sizeable reward -- but nobody ever wins on the damn things, so I just scratch the last square and throw it away. Hell with that! I'm a sexy, paradigm-shiftin' iconoclast, I don't need your conventional numbering system.

And now my rebellious, snotty attitude has paid off in spades! Ten Air Miles, oh boy! I'm gonna take these ten Air Miles and, and... and fly to Transcona! Yeah, that's right, I bet you're jealous! Ha!

2 comments:

Robin H. said...

Sexy yes... And for that I'll let it slide about the whole "nobody wins" thing! Actually... I honestly don't care, I mean I just work there is all. :P

Anonymous said...

I remember that Blockbuster Video did a similar promotion roughly a decade ago. Most of the prizes in their contests were coupons for video rentals and for their partners/affiliates. Um... whee?