Weekly RoundUp 9-20-2011 - Page 2

Here's the Modern Family review.

Bridesmaids was funny but I'll wait for a Price Drop, same with Spartacus, good series but only 6 episodes.

Toys R Us also has in-store coupons for discounts on Cars 2 and The Lion King if you pre-order when buying any other Disney movie. Not sure what their deals on those will be, though.

Anyone know of a Disney Store offer on any of these? They sometimes have interesting coupons and/ or bonus tchotchkes.

TRU is a big CF if you try to to pre-order a title like the Lion King BD and have the $8 discount go towards a sale priced item like the Dumbo BD.

In my case the $8 discount got pulled from the non-sale price of $29.99, and then the computer pulled $2.00 from somewhere to make the total discount on Dumbo the $19.99 sale price.

When I went to sort things out, there was basically a "difference in interpretation" of where the $8 was supposed to come from. The clerk's take was it was going to come from the Lion King BD, though it reads quite differently on the actual card.

I wound up just asking for a refund of the $5 pre-order deposit, rather than have to go back in two weeks and go through the whole thing again with someone with a totally different "interpretation." That even proved difficult as the system wouldn't accept the return of a pre-sale item.

The clerk said he had just spent an hour going through something similar with another customer. The lady who was trying to help me at first (but wasn't doing a very good job) needs to brush up on her reading comprehension skills.

I'm not sure why I went for the Lion King. It has never been a Disney film I particularly enjoyed. We do crazy stuff to save a couple bucks sometimes...

 

Doesn't TRU usually have these Disney preorder deals programmed into their system rather than leave it upto the clerk/cashier's intepretation?  That was my experience in the past.

 

Sounds like the $8 preorder promo discount should be deducted from the sale price of Dumbo, no?

 

_Man_

 

Yes, the deal says get $8 off a second Blu-ray priced $19.99 and higher when pre-ordering the Lion King Blu-ray.

 

The root of the problem was the computer wasn't programmed correctly, leaving it to the clerks to try to figure out what happened (and also get it wrong). So it wound up being one of those classic scenarios where the over-reliance on a machine to tell us what to do suspends all ability to use our brains.

 

EDIT: Folks at DVDTalk are having similar experiences. Looks like the system is set to discount from the regular price, and then grant the most favorable price, which explains why the final discount on Dumbo wound up being $19.99 instead of $21.99 (the $8 discount essentially was voided in favor of the current sale price, but this was reflected on the receipt as both an $8 and $2 discount). I think it would have involved fewer mental gymnastics and confusion if they'd just said you can't apply the discount to the sale price and let the customer figure out what's the better deal. But then I guess that means they wouldn't be getting as many Lion King pre-orders (which they didn't anyway in my case).