AIBU or is BIL being a CF?

[scarbados]

DH is a warehouseman at a large DIY chain. He gets a generous staff discount which we've rarely used for ourselves. This week BIL has been emailing him because SIL wants a new kitchen and they think it would be good to let DH do the ordering and use his discount, saving them about £400.

Normally I wouldn't mind - we've ordered on behalf of friends in the past. But BIL has spent 16 of the 17 years I've known him working for an entertainments organisation who manage a large venue here. He can obtain heavily-discounted (and often free) tickets for events but has never offered us anything. He did go through a phase of messages to DH saying thing like 'Don't make any plans for your birthday -we've got tickets for whatever, but that ended when DH told him I should be consulted first and preferably included in the plans. Since then, no tickets for anything.

I'm mad at DH for agreeing to do this ordering when there's been nothing reciprocated. AIBU or are BIL and SIL being CFs?

Your DH will need to carefully check the staff discount policy before he agreed to this.

As others have said, these schemes have really tightened up over the years and what seems like a innocent favour for a family member could lead to your DH being disciplined or even sacked for abusing his discount benefit if he falls foul of the rules.

This comes up fairly regularly on the employment issues board, and there’s frig all the union etc can do if the staff member looks like they’ve tried to defraud the company, even if they were acting in good faith.

There was a thread a few months ago where the OP’s dad had bought a washer/drier or something using her discount card and as part of the investigation the poster had to prove that the goods were being used in her house.

Surely in real life, must people would take advantage of a staff discount to save their sibling a lot of money especially if it's no skin off their nose..
stay out of it op.

Bollocks, miscible, demanding your DPs family ask your approval before inviting them anywhere is just abusive. Making your partner feel bad for having any sort of social life which doesn't involve you is abusive, especially when it's with their own family. My DH goes to the rugby and pubs with his DBs. I go to museums and gardens with my Mum and cinema nights with female friends. I would also view being told my family had to ask the permission of DP before asking me anywhere as grounds for divorce and abuse. It's also dicey on legal grounds, under the new emotional abuse laws, if it could be shown to be part of a wider pattern of control and abuse it could well be illegal.

It's always how abuse starts, cutting off and isolating a person from their support network. Making it difficult for them to see family and friends, expecting them to ask 'permission' to do normal things, provoking arguments over trivial subjects in order to justify cutting out friends and family.

It's destructive, harmful behaviour, not just for the victim, but also for the controller - they will end up sabotaging all their relationships with their need to control.

I really don't think it is either helpful or productive to tell the OP her expectations are okay, they're not.

Bollocks to you, DTS, self-evidently no-one is "demanding" that anyone asks for "approval". It's just that sort of outright misrepresentation and exaggeration that I'm talking about. It's just reasonable to act with a bit of human consideration of other people's feelings. It's a massive exaggeration to say that wanting to be with your spouse on your respective birthdays equates to making them bad for having any social life without you.

If I knew that it was likely my DH had arranged something for my birthday and then someone told me they planned to get tickets for something on that day just for me and them, of course I'd say that I wanted to check first with DH. If he's gone to trouble to do something for me, it would be spectacularly nasty to say "No thanks, I've got a better offer and it doesn't include you."

Whilst it might be OK to decide to spend time with my sister on my birthday occasionally, if my sister made a habit of inviting me out on my own on my birthday regularly, I would (a) wonder what on earth was going through my sister's head and (b) politely decline. After all, there are still the other 364 days in the year for us to socialise.