So I know, you are saying to yourself, ‘Sean never keeps his word, he always says he is going to continue writing in his blog and he always falls short’.  Well, you are right, BUT this time, I am going to try my best to continue writing (at least a few times per week).

So yesterday, a funny thing happened.  The story started earlier in the day before I got off work.  I was at my computer, programming away when JJ messaged me and told me the supermarket had a special.  She said her boss told her that today at Carrefour, which is the closest huge supermarket near my apartment, was 50% off, all goods.  Everything in the market she said.  I thought to myself, holy crap, that’s awesome.

It just so happened that in the evening, JJ had her usual Wednesday piano class in the same complex as the Carrefour supermarket, so while she was attending her one hour class, I decided to try my luck in the supermarket and take part in this amazing deal.  When I arrived at the entrance to the supermarket, I saw several huge signs and banners, clearly in lots of unintelligible Chinese characters.   I did see in the center, there was something that looked like:

600元 => 300元

My intuition told me that this was in fact the deal.  You pay 600 RMB (about $85) and you only pay 300 RMB; this is what translated into 50%.  So I thought to myself, great, spending 600 RMB on groceries is going to be awesome and even slightly difficult considering the vast amount of food you can get for that much money in one shopping spree.  I began to look around, thinking about what I would buy that I normally would not buy, what products are more high-end, imported products I could never gravitate towards buying.  I got a bunch of steak, chicken, seafood, some good deli meats and cheese and cream cheese.  I bought a bunch of Western bread and extra virgin olive oil.  I then went to the foreign imports section, picked up some good sauces, bbq, steak, then picked out some fixings for pasta; noodles and white cream pasta sauce.

The whole experience of buying stuff when you know everything is half off is really fun actually.  It is as if the prices don’t matter and coming from me, a person who is normally driven in the supermarket by the prices, that can be godsend.  I felt like I was finally that successful millionaire that doesn’t give a rats ass about what he spends and just gets what he wants.  To have that feeling, if only for an hour, was great.

By the time my shopping cart had reached around 550 RMB (50 RMB left), it had been an hour and JJ was finished with her class.  I told her to meet me in the supermarket and we could pay and then lug all of this stuff home.  She met me in the perishable department and I showed her all the crap I had picked out.  Then I had a revelation that was to define my evening and this blog post.  What if my intuition about the signs and banners was not entirely correct.  There were a lot of Chinese characters around those key numbers that I had interpreted.  If I were to trust signs and banners in English and only read the numbers, I would probably be deceived each time by what we call the ’small print’.  Could it be something as stupid as ‘This promotion does not apply to XXXX type of food?”.  Or could it be a step worse, something that is completely unrelated to a 50% deal.  I was to find out.

I covered my eyes as JJ approached the banner in the front of the store.  Her bad news made my heart drop to the floor. “No actually this says that if you buy 600 RMB worth of stuff, you get a coupon for 300 RMB that you must spend in the next two weeks.”  But there was more.  “The coupon cannot be used towards food, it must be used for things in the non-food floor”.  Disaster had struck.  All this time, spent for nothing.  I now had compiled over 600 RMB of groceries and I’m discovering it was all for nothing.

I then did what any Fannan would do in a supermarket.  I carefully moved the shopping cart over to an unoccupied aisle, pretended to browse whatever was on the shelf at that exact location and covertly walked away, leaving my glory behind me.  I was pretty furious, mostly because I probably should have seen this coming.  If I think about it again, I definitely should have asked about the stupid promotion.  And on top of that, 50% off in an entire supermarket in China, that would be a complete and utter madhouse.

If you are asking yourself, ‘Why didn’t he just buy the stuff, it was still only $85?’.  Well, you would have to know that that is definitely not my style, I’m way too cheap for that.