Napster performs for the troops

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Let me clue you in about "military discounts."

95% of them are bunk garbage! When you get into the actual nuts and bolts of discounts for Military personnel, it's pretty much fluff.

Service members pay taxes - taxes pay service members, ergo they are self employed! Every time I brought that up when I was in the Navy, someone above would get really pissed, then I would ask, why am I and all these other volunteers, paying taxes (essentially ourselves) to defend this country? The answers varied but essentially were the same: Shut-up and do your job!

At best, any discounts on anything I, or my fellow service folks got was 10% off. That was it, and even then that was high. The average discounts were around 2-5% and the things discounted were items used by a few people. Not things that were in common demand. At any rate, in California (or should I say Kalifornia) a 10% discount is squat considering the tax rate is like 8.25%, so your discount is in reality 1.75% and unless you made a large enough purchase (which most of the discounts didn't cover items that would fall in that realm) the savings was insignificant.

Airline tickets, I remember going to buy airline tickets for my leave periods. So of course I would look up Military Discounts... how is a standard (military discounted) airfare of say $365.00 round trip from San Diego to Seattle a better deal than the standard airfare for a civilian $287.00, for the same trip, same depart and arrival times a better deal? And before you spout off about MAC flights, forget it, those are SPACE A and if you are not high enough on the food chain, you could get bumped which will mean you will either be UA or have to shell out a lot of money so you are NOT UA! (UA == Unauthorized Absence. Anything over 30days is considered desertion.)

Bottom line, the discounts offered to service members SUCK! The only time I EVER saw a discount worth a damn was in country Iraq during the first 2 conflicts. Then I saw tax free, duty free pay. Plus the bonus of combat / hazardous duty pay. But AT&T actually gave a lot of us over there free or 50% off of some really good calling cards. But that is the only time EVER in 14 years of military service, I saw any kind of discount worth getting.

GSM1(SW) J. McDonald
USN
MED-RET

Posted by: Linux User 147560   Posted on: 08/11/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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