Tuesday, September 04, 2018

bizarre receipts

Korea is a country of over-redundancy. You have to get through several layers of plastic wrapping to reach a snack, for example. You have to sign your name on a single bank form several times, despite the fact that a single signature will do. Korean websites are always asking you to confirm each step of any multi-step process you might be engaged in. So it only makes sense that, when your fried chicken gets delivered, you'll end up getting two receipts.

What I found interesting, when I looked closely at both slips of paper, was how the two receipts broke down the price I paid for my fried-chicken tenders. The total was W19,000, but as you'll see, even if you can't read Korean, that total was itemized differently on each receipt. Below, the receipt on the left separates the cost into "taxable amount" (W17,273) and "tax" (W1,727—that's a whopping 10% sales tax!). On the right, the receipt separates the total into the item delivered (W17,000 for the chicken) and the delivery fee (W2,000).


So—conclusion: what I paid for and why are cosmic mysteries. Can someone skillfully argue that these two receipts don't contradict each other in their itemizations?

ADDENDUM: I noticed that the time stamps indicate the right-hand receipt was printed out the moment the order had been taken, while the left-hand receipt was printed at the moment of delivery and payment. I don't know whether that information does anything to explain why the receipts itemize things so differently, but there we are.



2 comments:

  1. I just got back from the bank a few hours ago where, I kid you not, I had to print and sign my name on various forms eleven times. Of course, the space for writing out my name on each of these forms was too small for my name, and somehow kept getting smaller with each form.

    I feel that I am now ready to inscribe the entire Harry Potter series on a grain of rice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I feel your pain. Every month, when I do my wire transfer to my US account, I go through the multiple-signature procedure. Joy. One sheet of paper gets my name printed on it five times, and my signature on it three times. A second, smaller sheet of paper (with the too-small spaces you mentioned) gets my signature twice.

    Oh, and I recall signing my name quite a few times on that stupid SK Telecom cell-phone contract.

    ReplyDelete

READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!

All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.

AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.