Swings and roundabouts

Orange have been offering discounts on cinema tickets for Tuesday showings, for quite a while.  In England they called the programme Orange Tuesdays, over here in France they call it Orange Cinéday.

We have been using it on and off ever since we took out our mobile phone contracts, and at first it worked well:  we'd turn up at the cinema, use the app on the smartphone to ask for our discount code, and off you go.  Except more recently, it started telling us that it had run out of discount codes for that week, and would we kindly like to try again next week.

Well, it's a bit annoying.  The advertising doesn't explicitly say that there's unlimited discount codes, but the wording of the publicity at the time "every Orange customer can (get one)" isn't exactly clear on this point.   The obvious thing for customers to do of course, is to get your discount code on Wednesday for the following Tuesday in case there's a film you want to see, and if you don't use it, well, it doesn't cost you anything.  And Orange end up with a lot of unused codes and frustrated customers.

Today, we turned up at the cinema and we got our discount code; they had not run out yet.  And I discovered that my Cinéday app has two important improvements:  The first one is that it tells you that Orange offer (if memory serves) 50,000 discount codes for use on every Tuesday.  This is a clear indication that the offer is limited.  Second, if it turns out you don't need your discount code, you can "offer it to the sharing community of Orange users".  Cool - a direct appeal to the solidarity of the French people.  And it appears to work.  Bravo, Orange.

We were sat at our usual coffee place, and Anita ordered a Coke.  It was the man I take to be the proprietor who served it, and I noticed that the can is different from what I am used to.  I mentioned it to the proprietor, and he said, "yes, it's 250cc instead of 330cc, but my distributor charges the same for it".  I quizzed him on ths point, and he cofirmed that he meant the price per can was the same, not price per pallet, or per volume.   That's a 30% price hike slipped in there.  Nice work.