Ordinary Gweilo

A while back I mentioned the HSBC ‘Instant Gift Draw’

Well, I managed to qualify for this stoopid draw by spending over HK$500 in Park’n’Shop, and so I called their hotline to register. As I expected, it is a painful process – the first time something went wrong after about 3 minutes so I had to start again. The second time it took nearly 5 minutes to listen to all the options, key in the details from my receipt, listen to what I had entered, and press ‘1’ to confirm (every single time). What did I win – a HK$20 voucher for Park’n’Shop? Is that really worth about ten minutes of my time?

It’s like the MTR ‘Buy 10 Get 1 Free’ promotion. If you travel 10 times during the week you can get a free ticket, but if you forget to go and pick it up (or don’t want to queue) then you miss out. The KCR, on the other hand, achieves a similar result by deducting 20% from every 2nd trip during the same day.

Yes, I know that the free MTR ticket can be used when you wish, which means that you can get a free cross-habour journey, whereas the KCR offer automatically applies to your next journey, but I’d rather everyone got the benefit rather than some people getting extra and others getting nowt.

Which reminds me of an ex-colleague who was working in Hong Kong a few years back when we had the Stored Value tickets rather than Octopus cards. The trick with these tickets was to get the remaining value down to 30 cents (or as low as you could) and then travel, say, from Tsuen Wan to Heng Fa Cheun to get the maximum value on the final trip (after which the machine swallowed the ticket). My colleague didn’t understand, and when his remaining value got down below HK$3 he would throw the ticket away because he thought it was useless! Oh dear.