More Carl's Jr. coupons than mortal man should ever possess
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Seriously. I have far, far more Carl's Jr. coupons than I know what to do with. Don't get me wrong: I like Carl's Jr. and all. It's decent enough fare, as fast food goes. However, the nearest Carl's Jr. is fully fifteen minutes away under even the most ideal of driving conditions, so it's not really the sort of establishment where I can just pop in on the spur of the moment. Though frankly, even if a Carl's Jr. magically manifested itself in my driveway, I think I'd still lack either the pathological intensity or the arterial fortitude to slog my way through the sheer number of coupons I have on hand.
Oh, I know what you're thinking: "How does a CraigsLister, however enterprising, find himself the proud owner of enough Carl's Jr. coupons to feed a small South American invasion fleet, in the unlikely event that such a troupe should show up on his doorstep and demand low-cost meals?" Well, y'see, here's the thing:
I'm unemployed. And what with being unemployed and all, I've been doing what I can here and there to get in the occasional spot of folding money. Most significantly, I've been buying and selling tickets to Giants games. It's not the sort of endeavor where you can rake in enough dough to cruise around town in a brand new BMW M3 with a quartet of concubines hanging off of your various appendages, but if you have enough free time at your disposal - and what with the whole "unemployment" thing, free time is something I have in spades - you can scratch out a marginal living. I don't make more than a few dollars on any given ticket, but what I lack in profit margin, I compensate for with volume.
So I've touched an awful lot of tickets over the last several months. Dozens. Hundreds, even. Which would be just ducky - well, were it not for the Giants' new Electronic Ticket Transfer system. Yep, that's right: you can "beam" away the ownership of tickets without having to physically hand your tickets to anybody and the tickets you hold simply become inactive. As a result, I've got a slew of inactive Giants ticket stubs around from various and sundry games....
...and each stub has a Carl's Jr. coupon on the back. Hence the bind I'm in.
As for the coupons themselves: each one touts a "free X when you buy a 32 oz. drink", where "X" is a Famous Star, a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, or a Charbroiled BBQ Chicken Sandwich. (Thirty-two ounces constitutes a "medium", for those of you playing at home. Observations about the nature of American portion sizes will be left as an exercise to the reader.) So it's a pretty good deal, all things considered. Even if you promptly use the drink to water your azaleas or douse passersby with Mountain Dew, you're getting a hamburger at roughly half the stated price; if you were going to purchase a drink while you were there anyway, the coupons are even more valuable.
I figure that somebody out there must have a burning yearning for massive quantities of Carl's Jr. coupons. Possible takers of the coupons include:
Someone who eats at Carl's Jr. every single day without fail. Possibly several times a day, for all I know. These coupons could save such a person untold hundreds of dollars - dollars which they could put towards more purposeful ends, like acquiring therapy to cure them of the obsessive-compulsive disorder causing them to eat at Carl's Jr. multiple times daily.
A team interested in experimentally deriving the region in which "participating locations" exist. Do all Carl's Jr. restaurants in the greater San Francisco Bay Area accept the coupons, or are there a few anomalous stores who refuse them? If one visits a Carl's Jr. in, say, Dallas, will they honor these coupons, or is that too far afield? You could tabulate this information, display it in graphical form, and become the proud author of a super-quirky webpage which nets you fifteen minutes of well-deserved fame!
A collector of miscellaneous ironic items in the commercial world. 'Cuz the tickets are from the Giants, you see, but they explicitly state "Not Valid at Pac Bell Park locations". Whoa. Heavy.
While I'm on the subject of coupon restrictions: the coupons state that they're only good for one item per customer per visit, so if you'd had hopes of making a bulk purchase of Western Bacon Cheeseburgers to be flash-frozen and preserved for future generations to enjoy in the event of a nuclear holocaust, you might want to rethink that strategy. (Though "visit" isn't strictly defined on the coupon anywhere; if you try leaving the restaurant and immediately re-entering while sporting a pair of Groucho glasses to fool the register jockeys there, I'd be very interested in knowing whether that strategy works or not.) Also, the coupons' expiration date is 10/31/03, so if no one takes them off of my hands by then, I'll end up hanging out at various restaurant locations, doling out coupons in a Hamburgler-defects-to-team-Happy-Star-to-dole-out-Halloween-goodies-early sort of moment. Nobody wants that.
So here's your grand opportunity to acquire as many Carl's Jr. coupons as your heart desires. (If you feel like floating some goods and/or services my way to thank me for my troubles, that'd be great - I'll take what I can get at this point.)