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Journal lingqi's Journal: September 17th, 2003 15

Journal by lingqi

September 17th, 2003 (6:20pm)

about those beer-tickets...

beer tickets comes in various flavors, corresponding to the big beer manufactures like asahi, sapporo, kirin, yebisu, etc... They basically work like gift certificates that you can use to buy - surprisingly, beer =)

Since I don't drink, I can only pass on what I was told - which is that in liquor shops it doesn't matter to the shop owner what brand of beer you buy - since it's basically all the same to him/her - so you can use asahi ticket to get sapporo beer if you want... kind of like food stamps but seems a little more sinister for some reason to me.

You can't trade it for cash even in liquor shops, though...

Now, an interesting tidbit is that a while ago I was watching the news and they were talking about a lot of counterfeit beer tickets originating from China... haha... But that brings up a serious point: since money is harder to counterfeit, wouldn't it be a much more enterprising activity to counterfeit things that is worth money, but still relatively simple?

Granted, beer-tickets look kind of like AMEX travellers' cheques with those laser hologram thingys - so not that easy to come by with just a color printer; but i am sure it's easier than the water marking, the embedded printed strip, the color fibers, and all those for counterfeiting money...

Speaking of which, how about counterfeiting food stamps in the US? I wonder how hard that'd be, actually.

Have dance lesson today so I will stop here.

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September 17th, 2003 More

September 17th, 2003

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  • US Food Stamps (Score:2, Informative)

    by heliocentric ( 74613 ) *
    US Food Stamps are now predominately electronic. You get a card sort of like a credit card and it carries a balanced that is updated by the gov.

    Gone are the glorry days of the little books filled with stamps.
    • hmm... that kind of sucks...

      I wonder how much privacy invasion is happening here too...
      • Well, I think with the electronics is limits the ability of the food-stamp erpson to buy items they aren't supposed to buy. Baby food is good, beer is not. That sort of thing. But it doesn't limit the people I see who just have two sets of items in their cart, one they pay for with the stamps and the other with cash.
      • Perhaps some, but the biggest reason that food stamps went to the EBT card system was because the currency system was both inefficient and led to different points of corruption.

        Consider just one easy racquet for you to run under the food-stamp-currency system. You can't buy booze with food stamps. So, you find an alcoholic with food stamps and buy his/her food stamps by exchanging them for booze worth 50% of their face value. Now, you find someone with a lot of children who could use some more food sta

        • iiiiinteresting...

          I actually never held foodstamps in my hands in person, so I don't know what they looked like... but now that i think of the times i saw them in the market, they do kind of look like monopoly money...
        • Well, actually, the racket seem to go lke this (I've seen it):

          1. Buy a really, really cheap item, with the smallest denomination of food stamp. In our case it was 5 cent bubble gum with the $1 food stamp.

          2. Get 95 cents change back.

          3. Repeat 1-2. Then repeat it again.

          4. Buy cheapest 6 pack of beer for $2.85.

          If you go to negborhood grocery stores, you will see that there is always a conviniently placed cheap item very close to the counter...
          • Well, I was angling for an actual profit margin. The racket I described was so common it actually made it onto sketch comedy shows.
            • Interesting. So thereby these "hood" grocery shops are actually doing some good by bringing the "real" value of a food stamp up to 95c, by preventing alcoholics to sell them at 50c a piece. Hmmm...
              • That's an interesting and also correct assessment of the situation, I suppose. Of course, the numerical figures I used weren't exact...I was merely showing how to generate a profit margin. ;)
  • Or almost any any other gift certificate. Just take it to one of those discount ticket shops that are everywhere. The same places that sell discount Shinkansen tickets and the like.

    I believe they'll pay you about 90% of face value.

    See http://www.tokai-ticket.co.jp/price/sell/beer.html [tokai-ticket.co.jp] for an example.

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