Santa's 20% Off Adventure

 Every year for many years now, Santa has gone Cost Plus World Market for The Ravishing Mrs. TB's stocking stuffers.

Santa, it seems, is a bit of a lazy bum in this regard and (apparently) is a great believer of "one-stop" shopping.  However, he is also a wily and knowledgeable shopper and knows his gift giving audience.

Cost Plus World Market, if you do not have one in your locale, was originally a sort of "exotic goods" sort of ground for Americans that never went to foreign places.  Over the years they have expanded away from cheaper items into furniture, native produced goods, and cooking/food preparation items - and wine, perhaps the most important element of any good stocking.  Between the different sorts of food, coffee, candles, and other knick knack things - and the wine, of course - Santa does pretty well for himself.

This year, as Santa was getting ready to make his "last minute run" (not only is Santa a lazy bum in the shopping sense, he tends to putting off going at all), he received an alert from The Ravishing Mrs. TB (who, strangely, seems to know where all the stocking stuffers come from) letting him know that Cost Plus World Market was giving a 20% discount if you shopped remotely and picked up it up at the store.   Add to that the discount one gets when one is a "member", and the savings started to add up.

And so Santa, bless his lazy behind, shopped online, waited to get his notification, and leisurely drove down to the store to pick everything up.

Beyond the fact that Santa is 1) Lazy; and 2) Predictable, there are a couple of interesting facts here:

1) That a store can give a 20% discount across the board and consider that to be profitable says something about their mark up.

2)  I am genuinely curious to see if this is a post-Plague habit that stays.  From the store's point of view, it probably makes sense.  Yes, they lose a certain amount of income from individuals not shopping in person and make impulse buys, but they save in terms of time to turn around orders (versus paying staff to check people out and answer questions and the casual shoppers that take up space and time and purchase nothing) and frankly (did not think about this until now) save on the risk of shoplifting.    I am perfect for this sort of thing:  for 90% of the shopping I do I know specifically what I want before I go in the store - why not just have it ready for me?

This only works for somewhere like Cost Plus World Market where Santa is rather familiar with the items that are present and knows what he wants.  It works much less better at a store where he does not have such insight - more of the blind firing of an Amazon order.

Either way, for 20% off Santa would shop this way every time.