firstfrost | Battles and non-battles

So, I stopped by Pearl on the way home to pick up a set of carvy tools for

twe. Armed with my printout of the picture she specified,

mjperson and I eventually found them on the second floor (Pearl has a second floor? Who knew?), hanging in a slot marked "List price: $7.00 Pearl price: $5.60". We trundled back down to the register, where it rang up for $7.83. Wasn't that $5.60, I ask? No, no, $7.83, he assures me.

So I leave mjperson to guard the carvy tools and go back up to check the price. Yup, it still says $5.60. I head back down to complain to the customer service desk. The woman there scans the carvy tools and says why, yes, they're $7.83, not $5.60. I say yes, I understand that, but it did say $5.60. She allows as how perhaps the $5.60 is incorrect. I try to clarify that I don't actually care about the two dollars (especially since it's not even my $2, and I have not been given a budget), but that I think it is perhaps misleading to have all these items under a sign saying $5.60. She still doesn't seem to see why I am causing such a fuss, and says she'll ask someone to take a look.

I give up and head back out into the rain. ("I was just settling in for the long haul" says mjperson, who thinks this is all a sneaky trick to get him rained on more).

I think I cared the wrong amount. I could have cared less, and not bothered fussing over it at all, or I could have cared more, and fussed until someone agreed to actually fix it (or gave me $2). Caring enough to fuss a little but not play to win seems... unsatisfying.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I find the mechanism of PITACs very appealing -- you've got this army of zealots running around helping you enforce your laws for free. The big problem is that they're an army of zealots, and zealots are often totally crazy people. Relying on psychological outliers often backfires. In democracies it gets even worse. The squeaky wheels get undue influence on legislation, and poor little mom-and-pop stores get saddled with unnecessary regulatory burdens that only big corporations really have the resources to adequately deal with.

That said, PITACs are still probably the best mechanism we could have. Way better than armies of government bureaucrats who spend all day at a desk filing mounds of paperwork and never actually get out to the store to look at the pricetags.