BARGAIN LAND

It was all my friend’s fault anyway.

If he hadn’t told me about how brilliant and groovy the whole thing looked in its spangly new clothes, I’d never have even considered buying the thing, and so when I’d accidentally spotted that whole new, repackaged version, which I hadn’t previously known had even existed until it popped up on that offers page, I’d filed it away in the “maybe” file and decided to keep half an eye out for it if it ever became cheaply available.

Of course, it was too good to be true, but, in a moment of boredom before work on Monday morning, I idly typed in the name of that very box set I’d been hesitating over and found it sitting there at such a ridiculously low and irresistible price, that I quite simply had to click on that “buy” button without a moment’s hesitation.

Even then, I thought, there must have been some mistake. Whilst I did spot the thing at the ludicrously low price of about sixteen quid for “one day only” just before Christmas, I had decided against buying it then simply because I had the thing already (albeit in an “inferior” older format) and the pre-Christmas expenditure pennies were already stacked far too high for me to add to them.

Since then, of course, the thing had never dropped below thirty-odd quid and seemed to have settled at around the forty-to-fifty quid mark and really didn’t look like shifting from that position any time soon, if ever.

But then, as I scanned the usual pages, there it was, large as life and screaming at me that it was suddenly available at slightly over a fiver and, well, I’d have been an absolute idiot to miss out on it at that price, wouldn’t I…?

I mean, that almost counts as “loose change” nowadays, doesn’t it…? There was even free postage, and I knew couldn’t even send a box of that size to anyone else for that sort of price if I had to…

Also, I felt that I really deserved to get a break and a little bit of payback into my personal “credit” column of life after the few weeks I’d just had, and the small but irritating fact that I’d had to fork out the extra quid the hospital car park machine nicked off me last Friday, even if it meant forking out a few quid that I hadn’t actually been expecting to pay out for something I sort of already had…

And so, as I already suspected it would, began another of my unsuccessful adventures in bargain land…

Well it was quite obviously too good to be true, but I thought that it was worth a punt, even though there was bound to have been some kind of a mistake and I was fully expecting an email to arrive informing me that the thing which I thought I was buying had been wrongly priced and that the company were going to withdraw it from sale.

Apparently they are under no obligation to sell it to you if it’s been wrongly priced, although it’s a bit of a “grey area” to be honest.

Either that, or when the bill came, I’d have been charged the full and proper whack instead of the ridiculously small amount that it had been displayed at, the same low price that had drawn me to it in the first place…

Perhaps they would send me the “something else” that was supposed to be attached to that link and point out, quite rightly I imagine, that I’d have to have been an idiot to expect to buy it at a price like that, and it must have been obvious to anyone that there’d been some kind of a mistake.

I was also preparing myself for disappointment, and fully expecting to have to return the wretched thing, and have to pay more than the price shown for the postage, such is my sheer bad luck whenever it comes to the finding of a bargain.

Still, the order remained (for a day or so) at the stage of “processing in warehouse” and the email telling me of some sort of ghastly mistake still hadn’t popped into my inbox, so you never know, I briefly thought, for once I might just have ended up being ahead of the game…

But, of course, I wasn’t, and never really thought that I would be. My order was cancelled due to undefined “technical difficulties” (i.e. We posted the wrong price up and we were never going to let you have it at that price), and my lovely bargain has turned to dust and blown away on the night air as it was always likely to.

Still it was nice whilst it lasted to think that I was actually ahead for once...