Bonnie and I sometimes shop at Sprouts Farmers Market, which is a cross between a regular grocery store and a health food store. In my weekly email, I saw an announcement that between March 18 and March 31, any Sprouts purchase earns you a coupon (on the bottom of your register receipt), entitling you to $10 off of a $75 purchase between April 1 and April 30.
Since we spend a couple of hundred dollars there every month, these coupons are valuable. I might take some jockeying in a single trip to get at least $75, but not too much over, so the next week we can do it again — but I’m up to that task. And I’ll make sure to get three or four of these coupons before the end of March.
There’s a Sprouts less than a mile from the South Point and it can be on the way between our house and the casino. It’s also close to the gym I frequent. At 7:15 a.m. on March 18, the first day of the promotion, I went by Sprouts and bought two navel oranges for about $1.50. Any purchase will get you the coupon.
The receipt didn’t have the coupon at the bottom. I asked the cashier, and he didn’t know anything about it. I asked to speak to the manager, and I showed her my email from Sprouts discussing the promotion.
She concluded that I was correct. She’d have to call up corporate and ask them how she was supposed to honor that commitment when the coupon wasn’t automatically printing at the bottom of the receipt. She didn’t want me to have to wait while she did all of that, so she created and gave me a $10 Sprouts gift card! Basically $10 cash on a $1.50 purchase. And you can bet that I’ll still collect at least three of these coupons before the end of the month.
There are 10 or so Sprouts markets in greater Las Vegas, but they are too far apart, and I was too busy to be interested in visiting additional ones the same day to see if I could collect again. For $50 apiece I wouldn’t have been too busy. For $10, I was.
At South Point that day, I lost about $750. No big deal. Normal swing.
When I later explained to Bonnie about my $10 win at Sprouts, she was dutifully impressed. Then I told her I felt great about that $10 win while the $750 loss immediately afterwards didn’t bother me at all.
Bonnie’s comment was, “Your thinking is so messed up!”
She wasn’t upset. She was just bemused. We keep our finances separate so she’s really insulated from my gambling swings and doesn’t pay a lot of attention to them. But my thought processes are very different from hers.
I guess most people feel that their own way of thinking makes sense, and I’m no exception to this. My gambling score will take care of itself. I’m playing with an advantage for relatively small stakes. That will all work out. If not at the South Point this year, then somewhere else. If not this year, then next year, and the year after.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m very confident that if I keep playing games where I have the edge, eventually the odds will work themselves out in my favor. It’s relatively simple math. The swings along the way don’t matter very much to me as they are small relative to my bankroll.
The Sprouts $10, however, was “found money.” It was close to being a trivial amount, but far more satisfying than finding an abandoned quarter on the ground. I was only there because of their promotion, and I recognized when it wasn’t being honored. I was able to explain it clearly enough and politely enough that they honored it in a way that was far more beneficial to me than the way the coupon was written.
The fact that the $10 win and $750 loss were on the same day was just a meaningless coincidence. Players who care about today’s score won’t agree with my logic at all. Players who are concerned with long term results just might find my logic makes sense to them as well.
IMHO there are two other ‘jackpots’ here:
1. Bob remembering to print and bring the email with him to the store. How many times have I forgotten to bring a document that would support what I would be asking for?
2. On this day Bob went to a store where the manager practiced good customer service. Since there are multiple stores in the chain, hopefully they all would practice good customer service, but ya can’t be sure.
I get excited when I find a nickel or dime or quarter on my exercise walks. I’m excited to tell husband:”I found a quarter on the ground!” Yet just this week, working on my 2021 taxes, out of 9 W-2Gs I cannot recall the games I won them on, the circumstances, etc. I vividly remember my first ever Royal Flush–quarter machine at Circus Circus in Tunica, decades ago. I still see in my mind the setting–second floor, machine close to railing overlooking the first floor, suit was Hearts, had held two cards, the young man who paid me, how special it felt, etc. A few others along the way are memorable for different reasons. But wins of 2021 are a blur. Weird.
Candy, what makes you think that Bob printed the e-mail? My bet is he just pulled his phone out of his pocket and brought up the e-mail to show the manager. No need to waste paper on printing almost anything now.
Same feeling I get when I spend a $100 at Fry’s/Kroger and save a whole two dollars at the gas pump with the point.
Bob said that losing $750 in a day was no big deal. His wife disagreed. I’m with the wife on this. But what that shows is that how you consider such a loss is an individual, subjective thing, not an objective fact. It’s probably mainly a psychological thing, but I think it’s also determined by how much money you have and how big your bankroll is. My bankroll (and probably that of most people) is a 3-digit number, and that’s why a loss of $750 would be so extreme and terrible for us. But I’m guessing that Bob’s bankroll is 5 digits, or at least in the high 4 digits. With such a large bankroll, then a loss of $750 might not seem so big. It’s a relative thing. I think that Bob knows that most people don’t have his large amount of gambling money, but he might be slightly forgetting it when he writes certain sentences in his blogs. Also, about his calling the $750 loss a “normal swing”, that’s true if you’re playing at the $1 denomination. But not if you’re playing at the .25 level, which I think is the case with the majority of people. Again, I just think Bob needs to remind himself that he’s not an average-money-echelon player, but rather is playing at a denomination that’s higher than average.
Remind himself? He generally flaunts it weekly.
He got super lucky early on and has a huge bankroll now to play with. Way to the extreme lucky player.
Bob Nelson, the reason I presumed Bob Dancer printed the email is that I am 3/4 of a century old and emails via my PC are still part of my world.
Well, when you get a 10 dollar gift certificate and later on you dump 750 dollars into a video poker machine, it’s hard to believe for me that the initial 10 dollar gift would have any impact any longer. I would be feeling grumpy anyways.
What about you would have received a 5 dollar gift certificate instead, or 4 more nevel oranges for free but then, by visiting the casino , you would hit 2 royals within 1 hour? Wouldn’t that be still the worse outcome for the day? I think not.
It’s like comparing apples to oranges. Having all those items come into play for a nice outcome to Bob’s grocery budget but has nothing to do with his gambling bankroll. However, the “found money” sure gives Bob a nice feeling whereas the loss was just a normal day at work.
Bob is thinking long term. You have not lost 750 in one day. Have you not had losing streaks of 2-3 days? You just keep playing. Your luck changes. A royal will cancel everything out. I was losing downtown and had horrible luck. Went to Palms. I hit 5 jackpots 1st day. That is why it is called gambling. Every dollar counts. I put a 100 bill in machine. I list it. Someone had left 2 dollars in machine. Got quads on the play. Off winnings I played 5 credits. Got Royal right. away. The ten dollars made me happy
You all forget there are days where instead of that $750 loss, there are wins that WELL EXCEED expectations. That’s the nature of high variance gambling games. Even ones where you the player have the advantage.
Some of the responses here verify what Bob dancer stated.
I love Sprouts, they do have good specials and excellent products, I go almost daily… And I do measure my live poker play long term, when some idiot ends up getting his/her third deuce to beat my pocket aces on the river I console myself with the knowledge that those idiots are why I have a poker bankroll, a healthy one. If everyone played like I play, I would take up lawn bowling, poker would be boring and exponentially tougher to do well. If everyone played video poker like Bob it would be near impossible to find a machine to play on, the casinos would fill their space with Little Mermaid slot machines…
Hey . . . I like Little Mermaid slot machines.
Calculating long-term is almost impossible to master. I guess at the end of the year you just check your bank balance.
Hopefully, Sangria, you keep a daily log of your gambling scores and W-2Gs. If you do it on Excel, you can instantly figure out your cumulative score, and look at the results of several years in the past. My bank account is used for a lot more than just gambling bankroll, and its balance is not really correlated with gambling success.
You got the better end of the deal by buying 2 navel oranges to get the $10 gift card but the bad thing is that prices for goods and services are increasing. Sprouts ran the promo towards the latter part of March knowing that by 1 April they were going to revise their prices much higher for staple food items. It was cooked in the books and pre-planned and if they revised their prices higher by 1 April that $10 discount would essentially be negated. That’s why the promo runs for the entire month of April, giving Sprouts enough time to continue to raise their prices. News broke yesterday that inflation rose 8.5% YOY from last March and 7.9% from February, Shadowstats has inflation around 16%. With fertilizer prices super spiking and the winter crop being eaten up food prices should be much higher mid to late summer. I would count on it.
Yes a 400k royal flush early in your gambling career certainly makes a diff. How many have a 400k bankroll to play high denomination with all the free play cash back gifts dinners. I assume all this is counted when you calculate your win loss. Doubt anyone simply playing video poker based on high pay back can make money every year except one. The responses sound like Covid everything said is believed as if carved in stone. It does make good writing though. I have said before I have played on same bankroll for about 15 years. Does this make me a winner? My bankroll is based on my play on high pay back machines if they are to be found. I don’t factor in cash back and room credit other than a mental note
You remind me a lot of myself. I am definitely a guy that would stop to pick up a penny on the street.
I have a funny update about “messed up thinking”. One of my guilty pleasures is diet coke from McDonald’. I typically roll through the drive-thru and buy one. It costs $1.08 w/ tax. I was amazed to find that there was almost always loose change scattered around the window where I pay. I mean almost every single morning. So, I took to parking far from the window so I could swing my door open to scoop up the change.
I did this for the better part of a month. Often there was enough to change to pay for my soft drink and then some more. I was getting paid for my morning indulgence! NICE! Until one day, an older gentleman working the register at the window threw a bucket of cold water on my parade.
“Sir, you DO realize that change is supposed to go to the Ronald McDonald House charity, right?”. At first I was confused and then I realized, there was a little coin slot bolted to the exterior wall just below the window. Folks had been trying to chuck their change into the slot, and many evidently missed. Holy Wow! I had literally been stealing from the Ronald McDonald House for weeks! This was NOT a good feeling. My wife shook her head and said “that’s the kind of thing that could only happen to you”.