Dead Souls and searching for a bargain.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


LENA
Yeah.

BARRY
So that pudding was bought, I
bought that pudding because of a
pretty interesting promotion that's
sponsored by Healthy Choice and
American Airlines. It's designed to
encourage airline travel and
obviously designed to encourage
buying Healthy Choice products.
They make frozen meals, deli meats,
pasta sauce, breads, soups and ice
creams, this sort of thing.....

LENA
Yeah?

BARRY
....I'm sorry....I lost my
thoughts, what I was saying....

LENA
You were talking about the
promotion --

BARRY
-- the promotion says: buy any 10
Healthy Choice products and get 500
miles of airline travel or 1,000
for purchases made with a special
coupon. So in the supermarket, you
notice their products, first you
notice they have a Teriyaki Chicken
Dinner at $1.79 - that's a pretty
good deal....but then I noticed
they had soup at 89 cents a
can.....and you start to do the
math and you start to notice that
it's a really amazing deal because
I stumbled across the pudding at 25
cents a cup. Now the crucial thing
is the bar codes on the label.
That's those little bar codes, you
know? The universal product codes?

LENA
Yeah.

BARRY
That's what's used to redeem the
mileage, so in noticing the
pudding, each cup had an individual
bar code -- in other words: Two
dollars and fifty cents for ten
cups of pudding is 500 miles. Add
in the coupon: it's one thousand.
You see?

LENA
Yeah.

BARRY
You see?

LENA
Yeah, no, I see --

BARRY
You see if you spent $3,000 dollars
on pudding you could earn over one
million frequent flyer miles.

LENA
That's insane. That is really,
really crazy. That's just crazy if
you spend three thousand dollars on
pudding.

BARRY
....yeah....

LENA
So that was your pudding?

BARRY
....No....

LENA
I'm sorry. I thought you said --

BARRY
No I didn't say that.

LENA
I thought you said you bought all
that pudding --

BARRY
My friend Carlos is doing it who
works with me. It's his. It's his
pudding, he's doing it. It's not
mine. He's crazy. I told him not to
do it. He's the one who's insane.
He only spent about one hundred
dollars so far though --

LENA
Your sister was telling me a pretty
funny story about you, when you
guys were kids and you were
building a ramp for your dog and
you threw a hammer through a window?
Is that right? You threw a hammer
through a sliding glass door?

Barry starts to WELL WITH TEARS, which he hides very
quickly, holds a hand up to his face as if he's touching his
nose, and then he smiles;

BARRY
I don't remember that, she might be
lying. I have to go the bathroom.

- Punch Drunk Love.



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