Friendship group of six. One member has a birthday coming up & the other five people decided to get together & buy her a big ticket item.
Site A sells the item for £500 so £100 per person, everyone agreed & was happy with this.
Site B has a deluxe version for £700 so £140 per person, everyone agreed this was out of budget & unanimously decided to go with the £500 option from site A.
Just before the item could be purchased, a member of the group, let’s call her Anne, said she had a 20% off voucher for site B which was due to expire soon & it would be silly to waste it so how about we use it to buy the deluxe version & pay a little extra as birthday girl has had a shitty time of it lately etc.
In the group chat, we discussed:
£700 - 20% = £560
£560 / 5 = £112 per person
Anne thumbs up emoji liked this message!
Everyone agreed they could stretch to the £12 extra & it was decided that we would buy the deluxe item from Site B. The ONLY reason we agreed to this was due to the discount voucher, everyone was happy to purchase from site A otherwise.
Anne purchased the item using the voucher & sent everyone her bank details asking for £140. When this was queried, Anne said the 20% voucher represented her 1/5 contribution & so everyone else owes £140.
- Anne knows the reason the £700 option was vetoed in the first place was because everyone - including Anne - agreed £140 was out of budget
- At no time did Anne say the 20% voucher was her contribution & the rest of us had to pay full price. Another member of the group had the exact same voucher & we could have used hers if we had known
- There are text messages where the group discussed the maths & agreed to £12 extra each & Anne did not dispute this & in fact thumbs up emoji’d it. Her excuse for this is she didn’t read the messages properly, the thumbs up was a mistake / she didn’t do it deliberately / know it was there & she is bad at maths anyway so tuned out!
So am I being unreasonable to think Anne is a cheeky fucker & deliberately mislead us? If we had stuck to the original plan then Anne would have had to pay £100 but this way she pays nothing & the rest of us an extra £40!!
Just to be clear, this voucher was one of those promotional email ones that are sent to those on the company’s mailing list, it wasn’t a voucher that had any monetary value or was a gift to her which would be different & like I said, another member had the exact same voucher which she was happy for us to use instead if we had known this is what Anne was doing.