I needed to buy a toaster for my Lunch in Venice rehearsals.

The whole cast eat pizza throughout the play and they will need to practice eating and acting at the same time. Not easy.

I had permission to splash out a massive £3.50 on a Tesco’s Value toaster, then decided to the blow the budget and get a 4 slice model instead of the 2 slice, so I could toast twice as much in one go!

Rich and I went over to Brooklands this afternoon and, having spent 15 minutes trying to get a parking space on the M&S side, (Credit crunch? What credit crunch?) we had a quick forage for the Tesco’s toaster.

No such luck. They had the 2 slice model, but the 4 slice had been discontinued. Oh well. I could have gone for the 2 slice, but something was saying said not to.

Anyway, off we went to Curry’s and Argos round the corner. Rich wanted to look at TV’s and guess what, completely by accident, I came across an Argos Value toaster complete with a ‘cool touch’, a ‘variable browning control’ and wait for it, a ‘cancel button’!

Whooppee!!

And to top it all, it was a white 4 slice model at a bargain £6.92!

Naturally I queued up with my little bit of gold coloured plastic and waited!

- Cashier number 5, please!

Two minutes later I was the proud owner of a FREE 4 slice toaster!

FREE????

Yep - courtesy of the marvelous Marks and Spencer!

You see, I bought some underwear there a couple of months ago - though now they are coming unstitched so I popped into the Brooklands branch after I’d parked and asked for a replacement.

They offered a refund, but I think the poor trainee must have got a little confused.

The underwear had come in a pack of three, and I had bought two packs. However, I’d left two pairs at home, since they were in the wash, and so she had four pairs in front of her, which I dutifully pointed out.

“Oh, four”, she said, and promptly typed x4 into her till, refunding me 4x£3 for two packs of value underwear at £3 per pack! So, £10 up since I had two pairs at a pound each at home in the wash, I was able to get a toaster effectively for free and still be £3.08 in credit!

Thanks M&S - RYT will be making very good use of their FREE value toaster, and I’ve got another £3 to buy some more value underwear!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Lunch In Venice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.