*** A tale of two bookstores.

We visited Rapid City for a day.  While there, I received an e-mail from BAM books indicating a 20% discount.  So, thought I would visit the store.  I ended up buying over $200 of books and CD's.  Got to the register and mentioned the PADDY discount.  Clerk said I had gotten it.  But, when I got back to my son's house, I looked at the receipt.  No 20% PADDY discount.  Went back to the store with a copy of the e-mail.  What I had not noticed was "online" buried in a fine print promotional into sentence.  The coupon ad was about 6 x 6 inches on my laptop screen and with type from about an inch and half high down to a half-inch or so high.  Nothing in the Irish green coupon to indicate it was only good online.  The clerk knew exactly what to look for and what I had missed.  She must have had this happen to dozens of customers.  I talked to other people who had been burned by this bit of deception and they indicated they were so pissed off that they would never buy anything at BAM books again.  I really think that business regulators should let BAM know that this kind of deception is not appropriate.

I did get some good books which I might never have seen on the AMAZON web site, but I did also compare the prices of the books.  Amazon was a bit higher on one or two and lower on the rest.  There was a $35 difference on the books.  Had BAM honored the PADDY coupon, the total price would have been nearly the same. 

I did get a couple CD's of old and deceased singers from my high school days.  The Marty Robbins album had "Singing the Blues", "A White Sport Coat", and "The story of my life"....all from late 1950's or early 1960's when our radio choice was almost only WNAX out of Yankton, SD...and now and then late at night KOMA from Oklahoma and a Chicago station or two.  Anyway, even if I can't remember what happened a week or two with great confidence, the words of those three songs were still buried somewhere in the recesses of my mind.  Had mostly the same effect with a Roy Orbison album titled something like "Black on Black" which I purchased mainly because we had watched the old black and white video of a Roy Orbison on SDPB-TV a week or two ago.  Years ago while at SDSM&T, my Logue friends and I attended a Marty Robbins concert at the old downtown auditorium in Rapid city which has since been demolished.

Well, enough of that.

****Stay tuned and read the damned fine print even if you won't find much of it here--- Doug Wiken

Comments

[W. J. Srstka]

Marty Robbins and Roy Orbison are well worth the price.

[Steve]

Doesn't it seem like a bad business model for a brick-and-mortar business to train customers to shop on-line with Amazon and so many low-price outlets only a click away? I would think the smarter play would be to incentivize customers to come inside and shop in the physical world.

[Mike Jones]

One of those Chicago stations was 890 WLS. Had killer music for the day and exciting car commercials for us small town boys. Mr Norm's Grand Spaulding Dodge they advertised Hemi Chargers and 340 Six Pak Challengers. Nikey Chevrolet advertised SS396 Chevelles and Camaros. We loved that stuff. KOMA in Okla. City was the old nite time standby music station. WNAX in Yankton was mostly country and bigband. On the tractor radios in the daytime, KSJB in Jamestown and KFYR in Bismark both had good music (rock and top 100, I didn't do country). I remember my grandmother listened to KOA Denver and WBBM/WGN Chicago on her Zenith Transoceanic. The geek in me had acquired a well used Hallicrafters SX-90? shortwave radio by the time I was 9. Listened to stations all over the world, wild stuff for rural Hamill, SD. in 1959. Radio Sweden had some great music programs in English. I heard most of the new release music weeks before KOMA/WLS ever played it.