Quick holiday-shopping quiz: If you see a billboard urging you to "load up for the holidays," what is the ad pushing--eggnog, legos, or lumps of coal?
No, in this case Santa's sack is loaded with guns & ammo. Yes: a big billboard on my route to campus wants me to lock 'n' load for Christmas. Did the three wise men pack gold, frankincense, and guns? How vastly different A Christmas Carol would be if Scrooge had turned a bazooka on those visiting ghosts! Can we be certain that Santa's red coat doesn't hide a shoulder holster?
But that's not the only befuddling sign of the season. Today at the grocery store--just an ordinary chain store in a middling town on the not-very-wealthy edge of Appalachia--I saw a sign posted near the gift-card display: "Gift-card purchases totaling more than $10,000 must be cleared at the service desk."
Who buys $10,000 worth of gift cards at the same time? Nobody carries $10,000 in cash to the grocery store, so it would have to be someone with a credit card allowing that level of spending all at once--definitely not an English professor, in other words.
Say you're a retired gent with too many grandchildren to keep track of and no clear conception of what sort of gifts they'd like, so you decide to give each imp a whole deck of gift cards, so you haul off several hundred of them. Or maybe you're an employer who wants to award employees bonuses in the form of gift cards so you need a whole sack all at once. I can imagine this happening occasionally, but often enough to justify posting a sign?
I didn't see any guns & ammo gift cards, so I guess I'll have to scratch that off my list.
4 comments:
My favorites are the ammo and bear specials at the local stop and robs during gun deer season.
Would that be ammo and bear or ammo and beer?
Hunting is a major source of income in our county, so during deer gun season I suddenly see a parade of pickup trucks heading out my road early in the morning, and then I see more stopping to fuel up. The general rule seems to be one case of beer per gun hanging on the gun rack.
Grocery store (or gas) gift cards are also sometimes a favored means of dispensing charity (because the things on which one can spend such cards are at least somewhat limited, though those things include wine and beer in my state, and one can always sell/trade the card itself at a discount if one wants something not available at grocery stores or gas stations). Still, $10,000 would be a lot for most charities to dispense at once, even during the holidays.
At my university, there are signs at the on-campus Starbucks saying you can't use the local "meal money" to buy gift cards, but that makes some sense. I'm sure students being able to cash out any unused money in the form of coffee funding for the break (for themselves or others) would mess up the whole complicated economy of student meal plans.
P.S. It just occurred to me: is $10,000 the limit above which banks are required to report cash transactions, presumably to avoid money laundering? If so, that might be the explanation.
Oops, that would be "beer."
Spelling is not my friend.
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