Cheeky Fucker - Group Gift

[TulaOfDarkWater]

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.

1. Anne knows the reason the £700 option was vetoed in the first place was because everyone - including Anne - agreed £140 was out of budget

1. 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

1. 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.

"Just to confirm Anne, you want to put your name on a gift you haven't contributed a penny to. Just a free discount voucher. I'm afraid this is not what we agreed to. Send it back. The rest of us will purchase the cheaper version and you can sort yourself out.

I bet Anne's present to your friend is nowhere near worth £100+. Hey, maybe it will even be a 20% off voucher against some future purchase.

Your friend will be delighted with the coffee machine, I feel sure.

Can you also get 20% off the cheaper model?

Such a shame that she wants to ruin friendships over a voucher . I’m flabbergasted that she seems to think she’s right . How does she justify it she hasn’t paid a penny and if she does do her own gift which is likely now then that will cost her actual money not a marketing voucher . Honestly you can’t help some people so leave her to it and just organise it between the rest of you.

I am sure if you post the make/model someone can locate cashback/discount code/layered savings etc to help you.

Glad to hear she has to return it. She is really taking the piss. Wishing your birthday friend all the best with her treatment.

The other member of the group then sent Anne her discount code for 20% off so she would be whole & we all thumbs upped that message (petty I know but we couldn’t resist).

Sorry, what does this mean and why does it rubs Anne’s face in it? I really need to know because I want to revel in Anne getting her comeuppance. She’s such a CF she makes Anna Delvey look like a novice!

I hope Anne's milestone birthday is still to come. You can never have too many 20% off vouchers!

I mean for the original gift to see if you can get it cheaper now Anne won’t be contributing.

Poor Anne,

She'll have to find a whole new set of friends to rip off.

I think because someone else in the group also had the same voucher.

I bet Anne is Cherie Blair.

That’s a punishment in itself really.

Having to return things is the bane of my life.

Could you imagine the reason she will give?

”well I paid with a voucher and the others won’t give me £140 towards it. It’s so unfair. I mean..I had a voucher! Of course I wasn’t going to use money when I had a voucher”

She handled that really badly. What a shame that she didn't want to resolve it. At least she's returning it. I'd be reconsidering my friendship with her.

Well, if this is real, she sounds terminally stupid. Ditch her.

Can't believe she chased you up for the money! Sounds like you handled this well OP, what a shame such a lovely gesture ended with a bad taste in your mouth, Anne should be thoroughly ashamed of herself.

What a peculiar conclusion. Does Cherie have form for being a group gift CF? 🤣

so are you getting the original £500 machine now? So £125 each (between 4 of you excl cheeky fucker Anne?) If so, £13 extra (on top of the £112 you were going to spend) well spent for getting rid of the CF. Think of all the yearly £100 you can save from buying her a bday present in the future! She's really shot herself in the foot - lose her whole friendship group for the sake of £112!

I hate to see threads disappearing but given the amount of stories the media get from MN, do you think it's worth asking for this to be deleted? Not because of Anne who deserves for the world to know what a cf she is but because you said you didn't want birthday girl friend who is already ill to have to worry about any drama.

Why? That seems a bit off the wall.

Oh well done OP you and your friends totally schooled Anne. She will know not to cross you next time. That'll show her!

Such a good end to the saga. Its almost like the whole thing is to good to be true.

Does she not understand how here not paying anything is acceptable

😧

Also - does anyone remember the birthday group present thread of a few months ago
That also involved a group of women where one friend was having a hard time so the group agreed to spend extra on a nice bday gift for her - they had considered a couple of options when CFF (cheeky fucker friend) randomly said she'd bought her £150 (something like that) of costa vouchers so could the others all pay her back? Birthday friend didn't even like coffee so the others were WTF, no, that's a terrible present and CFF went off in a huff- it later emerged that CFF had been given the costa vouchers as a present for herself, also wasn't a huge fan, so decided to rinse her friends by offloading them to birthday friend as a shit gift, and expecting the others to give her cash to spend on buying herself something better!

Must be some bizarre overlap between CFs, group gifts, and coffee!

Anne is claiming that her free 20% off voucher is "worth" her share of the money. She's asking for the others to pay their share, so one of them sent her a 20% off voucher as theirs as a joke. Obviously their 20% off voucher doesn't count as their share, neither does hers.

They all did "thumbs up" because this is what Anne did by "accident" when they agreed the price.

I'd be reconsidering my friendship with her.

Ship: sailed. There is no friendship any longer - Anne sold it for for the knock-down bargain price of £20/25 per friend, with no discount code available (depending on whether Birthday Girl will hear about it and/or still want anything to do with her).

I'm surprised that Anne mentioned the voucher in the first place, really. She might have been more successful in hugely overplaying how amazing and highly-reviewed the dearer one was and maybe lying about the many concerning reviews she'd seen for the cheaper one - claimed that it basically looked about four times as good for 'just' £200 extra. Then, she could have made sure she was the one to buy it, ask everybody for their £140, use her voucher and then nobody would have known that she hadn't paid a penny.

Except they would have known, because other friend would then have said "Hey, I've got a discount code for that retailer, so we'll only actually have to pay an extra £12 each for the much better one!" But Anne wouldn't have known that originally. It sounds like her scam was resting on her assumption that the discount code was esoteric knowledge, known only to a special few - like when Uncle Bryn thought he was the very first one to come up with 'Worldwide Web' as a handy mnemonic for the supposedly meaningless 'www' at the start of internet addresses