The House of Many Cars

[ladyofastolat]

I registered my Nectar card online yesterday, to open up the possibility of earning points on online shopping. It asked me to answer a few optional lifestyle questions, one of which was, "how many cars are there in your household?" The default answer was 7, and the drop-down list went from 1 to 9, followed by 10+.

Is this some aspirational thing? "Use Nectar vouchers to get 20p off a pint of milk, and you, too, will soon be able to run an entire fleet of shiny Jaguars!"

I wonder if anyone - anyone who shops at Sainsburys, anyway - has 10+ cars.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The default was *7* ? That's bizarre!

I suppose there might be the odd large multigenerational household where there are more than 5 cars, but even that has got to be unusual surely? Maybe they are planning some special promotion aimed, mysteriously, at sole-trader car dealerships??? All I can come up with!

[leesa_perrie]

And why was '0' not an option? Or are older people who've had to give up driving due to age/illness (or never learned in the first place), along with people who can't afford/have chosen not to have a car, not welcome at Sainsburys?!

And 7? Or even 10 plus? We're not talking Harrods or Liberty of London here, you know!! :D

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Oops. Actually, I think 0 was an option; I just wrote it wrong, because I was thinking in terms of positive numbers of cars, not all possible answers. But IIRC, it was preceded by a question that asked for an estimate of the annual mileage of your household's car(s), so the whole thing did seem to be working on the assumption that all households have cars.

[leesa_perrie]

Ah, okay! Though there does seem to be an assumption that all households have cars, but at least they're allowing for you not having any.

[andrewducker]

I demand the right to have negative cars!

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I think imaginary cars are probably more fun than either positive or negative ones.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

Perhaps they are planning how many car parks to build?I doubt you would shop at Sainsbury's if you owned 10 cars! I don't have any.THey would be better asking me about cats!

[adaese.livejournal.com]

I'm now trying to figure out the logistics of driving more than one car to Sainsbury's on one trip.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

The mind boggles! Maybe they hope you'll buy so much you'll need muliple cars to take it home?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

The members of a household could drive more than one car on the same trip, I suppose.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

My dad shops at Sainsburys, among other supermarkets, and I'm sure there have been times when he has had more than 10 cars - or at least significant parts of more than 10 cars; he used to buy them cheap and fix them up as a hobby. I remember we once swapped a cine-projector for a old VW caravanette, which I then helped him work on.

However, I admit my dad is an outlier, and that certainly doesn't explain the default being 7! (Though realistically, I suspect that is probably just a coding error.)

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

('Outlier'?? That looks wrong now I've written it down, though I can't think how else it could be spelled. But looking at it makes me want to pronounce it somehow to go with Outremer...)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

From now on, I fully intend to pronounce it to go with Outremer, too. I've always loved the word Outremer; the glamour of that word alone was what led me to choose the Crusades as my special subject for Finals.

And I think I can be fairly safe in assuming that the word "outlier" won't come up in conversation that often, so I probably won't have too many embarrassing situations in which I find myself using my deliberate, silly mispronunciation front of Important People. Um, not that this sort of thing has ever happened to me before, of course, oh no. :-D