Some things in NZ are walking jokes, like this last century’s music, the old cars, the millions of plastic bags that cross supermarket counters every day… but the most annoying practice (and this one is well tended by businesses and way ahead of anything we know in Europe) is the advertising-lie. To really get to you, advertisings are colorful, loud and promising, they completely ignore their product’s ingredients table and sales get unclear raplidly when the staff (or who-ever) puts products on wrong labelled shelves. Got us, when we thought we’d buy three sleeping bags for 75 $ and the cashier tells us, each of them will be 89,99 $ (in sum 270,) – which we didn’t realise while we typed in our credit card pin. But paid is paid and the cashier shakes her shoulders and shows us the way to the reclamation point where we wait, wait, wait and eventually will be offered a shopping voucher (where I find myself barking “no!”, and since we have no NZ bank account we made it clear that we can only accept cash back). But… as much as we’ve liked to get that sleeping bags, we’ve clearly saved money with that deal, not only by not buying anything but discovering another way to withdraw money without the nasty fees and commissions ;)
But not only clearly wrong labels cause confusion, there also is a common practice among tourists to pay with money that is either outdated or foreign or both. Not that I would, but obviously some people tried at this cafè:
