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.

@BeforeGodAndAllTheFish

Well done for trying, I can only hope your excellent explanation will stop people thinking that a railcard is A) free and B) able to get discounted tickets for all and sundry.
Some people just seem hard of thinking

I have always had railcards all my life, I had an individual one, then the two together railcard, now I have a friends and family one. I constantly use trains. They are only approx £30 for a year I often save more than that on 1 journey.
I have so many times used my railcard to buy group tickets. Even when I had an individual one. If the tickets were £100 each you would get £33 off one ticket, then everyone would just pay a little less.

Well done OP!

I know exactly what's going to happen now, Anne will reappear around the birthday time and will inform the birthday friend that you have all (including her...) got her a gift! So that when she is given it, she believes it to also be from Anne! Beware!!

Of course if I bought tickets for a group and my card got us a discount that's different (network railcard does this)

But you do need to ensure you all travel together.
A 2-together card is always for 2 pre-arranged people.

This group of friends atmosphere is certainly going to change after this incident. Anne will have shown who & what she is really like, attacking the others & blaming them for this fragmentation that is likely to occur will be her tactic

i imagine the group atmosphere was always full of tension and resentment as apparently she’s been like this for decades and despite the group being aware of it and pissed off, no one had ever said anything

not my kind of group of friends!

God I hope Anne gets discount codes and discount vouchers that nobody’s spent anything on for her birthday

£112 is what was agreed and is what I’d transfer. Tell her to reread the messages as it was very clear how much everyone was willing to pay

Tell Anne that the four of you have now decided on A , just £125 each . She can return hers .

Update in thread.

Update in thread.

I promise when I did this for my son's kindergarten teacher, I put every single penny into a card for all the children to sign and gift vouchers to restaurants she liked!

Railcard incident poster here, just to clarify a few points.
My railcard is individual only.
I have to both buy it and qualify for it and l doubt my (ex) friend would've wished to 'share' the qualification.
I do share the cost of days out equally with my dd, factoring in my railcard discount and will occasionally buy an extra coffee/cake/whatever with a friend travelling companion and say that's because my ticket was less, but disliked this ones enrltitlement and outright cfery asking me to do so.
Finally l think some posters got idea l was sticking up for Anne as in this scenario l was the holder of the discount albeit not a free voucher. I certainly was not, OP just reminded me of my incident as being one where someone was highly demanding and annoyed when failed in getting financial gain at expense of others (or one other in my case).
I really hope OP updates after the presentation although she has said she probably won't, as l would love to know the CFers antics and reaction as lm sure this won't be the end of it and she will continue her outraged cfery.

I think the ONLY person who could be more is a CF than Anne is the Mexican House Thief of days gone by.

Surely then, Columbo, if you correct grammar on the internet you should have known to use a colon there, not a semi colon.

@CheerfulYank I thought the same thing! LOL

This Ann is something else. I'd never be able to see her as a friend after such atrocious behaviour. She basically wants praise for a big gift when she got it for free. Cheeky indeed!

The railcard scenario is totally different and I can’t believe the posters who are saying they’d expect someone to share their railcard discount!

I’ve previously been the full-adult-fare payer travelling with a student/disabled/senior railcard holder and I wouldn’t in a million years have dreamed of asking them to split their discount with me! They got the discount because they qualified due to age/disability/student status and I didn’t. Why would they share it with me?!

Now I’m a full time (mature) student I have a hilariously named 16-25 railcard of my own (even though I’m well over 25) and it has never occurred to me to split the discount with anyone. I get the discount because I’m a skint student while my friends are all earning a decent wage, and if any of them were mean enough to insist that I reimburse them a few quid to make our train fares even then I’d think they were being unbelievably tight. Not the same thing at all as trying to pay your whole 20% share of a gift with a marketing discount code!

The railcard situation is crazy. The friend in that scenario is expecting someone to pay for their ticket on top of their own.
That's like me asking a friend to pay half of my supermarket shopping delivery charge because they've paid annually and get free delivery.

I’ve just read this aloud to my DH and we’re ending ourselves laughing at how egregiously awful it is. Cannot believe there are people like this out there. Best of luck to you all, OP, for the big gift reveal - hope it cheers up the birthday girl, sounds like she has four v lovely friends at least!

This thread is epic. Anne is such a CF and I’m so glad you’ve all sorted it.
I’ve had something similar happen with me and a former colleague. I’d planned on buying lunch at work and I usually spend £2.50 max but colleague said she had a lunch time Pizza Hut code where you buy one and get one free so she convinced me and another colleague to have pizza for lunch.
Both pizzas cost £12 with the code and the 3 of us were going to share it equally, I wasn’t going to eat more than 2 slices anyway but knew I had to pay my share.
we asked her for her own £4 and she started acting up. She expected the 2 of us to pay £6 each for something we didn’t even want to eat in the first place and expects her code is her own share.
This is a discount code you can easily find online. I ended up paying £6 because she just didn’t get it! That was the last time I did something like that.

Anne is disgusting

Wish I'd seen this earlier.
you could have used the second 20% voucher to get the £500 machine, so four or you pay the original agreed £100 each.

£500 - 20% (£100 ) = £400/4 (real friends) = £100 each

OR

£700 - 20% (£140) = £560/4 = £140 each (better machine but without letting Anne.get the better of you).

oh and about Anne
someone else's quote
"If you want to know what God thinks of money just look at the people she gives it to."

A disabled adult railcard gets you 1/3 off your own ticket and the ticket of another adult travelling with you. So if you were travelling with a disabled adult card holder you absolutely could have shared the discount with them!

The voucher was only valid on website B which only has the deluxe version, so they can't get 20% off the £500 machine.

Send her 3 £60 off Naked Wines as payment (the ones you get in your Saturday newspaper tv magazine).and tell her to keep the change.