On Mon, 28 Jul 1997 16:06:54 -0400 Stan Ryckman <[log in to unmask]>
said:
>Is it truly "worth" $200 if you can't sell it? I doubt it. Particularly
>if an equivalent licence can be bought for $200.
We make the claim that it is worth $200 because it is a $200 credit
voucher. You will find that most companies that issue vouchers make the
claim that they are worth their face value. And yes, precisely because
the same goods can be purchased for $200. To put it another way, we would
be in trouble with the IRS if we stated the value as anything less than
$200.
>If I won a trip worth $5000 to Tahiti, is it worth anything if I can't
>sell it to someone (since I would never take the plane trip)?
It may not be worth $5000 to you if you are afraid of flying, but you
could probably find someone among your family or friends who would enjoy
the trip. Likewise the prize we are discussing is a gift certificate.
It's meant to be given away, not sold. I don't know about the US, but as
a non-driver I am quite familiar with the rules for lotteries where the
main prize is an expensive car (which happen to be most lotteries). You
can take the car, or you can take a cash sum that isn't anywhere near the
value of the car (say, 1/3 to 1/2). I'm not the kind of guy who orders
full lottery regulations from the stated address and then reads it as a
distraction but I imagine that you can't resell the car before X years,
otherwise nobody would take the cash. I have yet to find one lottery
where you can take the car's actual market value in cash.
>Many prizes won on "The Price is Right" are unclaimed because the tax on
>the prize is greater than its value to the winner.
So? Last I checked, none of L-Soft's employees were US Congressmen.
>"Our own lists?" First time I can ever recall that a poster is supposed
>to worry about who may or may not be sponsoring a list.
My point, Stan, is that if you're selling L-Soft gift certificates on the
black market, we don't want to hear about it because we make the
assertion that we do not allow prizes to be resold. We don't want to have
to justify to an IRS inspector or whatever that we did not know that
certificate with serial such and such was sold on the black market and we
looked the other way. If people use our own lists to carry out this
auction business and we don't do anything to stop it, we're going to be
in a tight spot if this happens. I hate to spell it out, but if prizes
can be resold, there is always the risk that a programmer might make a
mistake and that a most regrettable BUG in the software might cause the
same people to win big prizes over and over, which they could resell for
real money. It is no coincidence that many lotteries have a "not for
resale" clause.
>I may seem overly cynical here, but I never got my T-shirt,
and it looks like this is the whole point you are trying to make here :-)
Look, I don't know what to say. We have shipped over 1500 shirts and
while I fully acknowledge that we screwed up and a few batches may have
been inadvertently "forgotten" by people who were not necessarily happy
to have to do all this extra work, down the road we did ship 1500 shirts
and a certain loss rate is inevitable, which is why we established the
[log in to unmask] address. To take one extreme case, there is this
guy to whom we resent the shirt three times and it disappeared three
times. Maybe it was initially part of the batches that were "forgotten",
but when we resend a shirt you can rest assured that it is resent. Maybe
there is a mailman somewhere who won't have to buy T-shirts for the next
20 years, or more realistically maybe there are people who incorrectly
assume that their co-workers would never steal a shirt from them (and
maybe the co-workers they have in mind would never do that, but maybe
there are new co-workers or temps or cleaning staff or whatever). I left
a box with a bunch of 10th anniversary shirts and a pair of sweat shirts
at SUNET, fully confident that nobody would EVER think of taking them
without asking me, but the hard, cold reality is that there was only one
sweat shirt when I came back a few days later. I don't think the people
I've known for 7 years stole it, but at the same time there are other
people who may have just walked in, seen a big box with a lot of T-shirts
(evidently promotional shirts as they were all identical) and a pair of
sweat shirts, and taken one sweat shirt (and possibly a number of
T-shirts, I hadn't counted them) with the full intention to ask for
permission at a later time ;-) Which wouldn't have been a big deal if it
hadn't been the last I had in that size and earmarked for someone. I
learned my lesson and I now transport the shirts in the exact amounts
that are to be delivered.
Either way, I don't understand why people are taking this shirt business
so personally. If you didn't get your shirt, do something about it and
write to [log in to unmask] The people who ship the shirts do NOT
read this list, so complaining here will not get you a shirt.
Eric
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