Purchasing Power
This is how Border’s steals my money:
The 3 for 2 sale books always seem like a good idea at first. There is nearly always one book that catches my eye and gets me thinking, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about reading $goodBook for some time now. Oh look, $lesserTitle is also 3 for 2… I really wasn’t planning on buying anything, but I wouldn’t mind getting these two, considering that if I get both, I could get a third for free!”
Problem is, there’s never a third book worth getting. Not even for free. There’s always one unquestionably excellent book, perhaps one or two marginally good books, good enough to get one but not both, and then the rest are lurid novels about the trashy, adulterous dealings of 40-something women, the inner lives of wordly teenage girls, or bawdy, semi-pornographic sequels to Pride and Prejudice.
$goodBook is almost always worth getting, though and after 10 minutes or so of holding it in my hands, getting used to the idea of carrying it around, owning it and telling my friiends how great it was, I’ve emotionally committed to buying it, and the inverted sense of finanical responsibility I’ve only semi-successfully learned from my first-generation immigrant parents compels me to get my Money’s Worth and pick two other books, as marginally interesting as they may be.
This is how I ended up with Eats, Shoots and Leaves (great), Longitude (heard good things about it, but cartography isn’t My Thang, per se), and Prep. (Yeah, yeah, tell me about it.)
So essentially Border’s has tricked me into buying one book for the price of two. Tricksy bastards.
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