{"id":7635,"date":"2010-10-19T08:49:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T23:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=7635"},"modified":"2010-10-28T11:27:33","modified_gmt":"2010-10-28T02:27:33","slug":"nhk-7am-this-morning-offer-coupons-at-narita-airport-to-nj-with-preferential-exchange-rates-the-catch-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=7635","title":{"rendered":"NHK 7AM this morning: Offer coupons at Narita Airport to NJ with “preferential exchange rates”. The catch is…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog.\u00a0 Related to my post last Saturday talking about how things were becoming cheaper in a deflationary Japanese economy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Something came on NHK News this morning at 7AM that nearly induced reverse peristalsis on my corn flakes due to excessive laughter.\u00a0 Deep breath:<\/p>\n

The exchange rate this morning was 81 yen and change to the dollar.\u00a0 The (well-grounded) complaint is that this is discouraging tourism to Japan and purchases from NJ tourists, due to things being make more expensive upon exchange.<\/p>\n

So NHK was breathlessly reporting (live) from Narita Airport this morning how authorities had come up with a great wheeze to stimulate spending!<\/p>\n

Ready for it?<\/p>\n

“PREFERENTIAL RATE COUPONS!!”<\/p>\n

Meaning that if you hold one of these coupons (they provided a graphic with a big-nosed (of course) gaijin clutching this precious slip of paper), you would get a discount on your exchange from dollars (or whatever) into yen.<\/p>\n

And that preferential rate would be?<\/p>\n

Ready for it?<\/p>\n

(Rips the Post-It off the graphic…)<\/p>\n

30 SEN!!<\/p>\n

Yes, 0.3 OF A YEN discount off your yen exchange rate!!<\/p>\n

They even conveniently calculated with a couple more graphic Post-Its how much you would save.\u00a0 Tourists, if they could see beyond their proboscis to spending some 2300 USD or so, the amount saved would be…<\/p>\n

Ready for it?<\/p>\n

(Rips the Post-It off the graphic…)<\/p>\n

EIGHT DOLLARS<\/strong>!!<\/p>\n

My god, I’m surprised people aren’t lining up!\u00a0 The main NHK announcers also found this decidedly uncooworthy.<\/p>\n

They also gave a rupo afterwards (with some token NJ tourists praising Japanese food) at a Narita cafeteria that was also taking drastic (and I mean DRASTIC!) measures to encourage consumption of their meals, by dropping some prices a few hundred yen.\u00a0 Some fried chicken had been reduced from 700 to 500 yen!\u00a0 (Albeit this price was arguably overpriced in the first place; a captive-market airport economy tends to do that.)\u00a0 We had some grateful NJ tourists praising the move, and closeups of one slurping noodles with a big grin.<\/p>\n

For all the money they saved from the preferential coupons (provided they carry a few thousand dollars in cash on them during their stay), they could get one free entree from this cafeteria AND a can of Coke from a vending machine — and still have a few yen change!!\u00a0 Roll up!\u00a0 Roll up!<\/p>\n

File under cluelessness.<\/p>\n

Seacrest Out!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Related to my post last Saturday talking about how things were becoming cheaper in a deflationary Japanese economy:<\/p>\n

Something came on NHK News this morning at 7AM that nearly induced reverse peristalsis on my corn flakes due to excessive laughter. Deep breath:<\/p>\n

The exchange rate this morning was 81 yen and change to the dollar. The (well-grounded) complaint is that this is discouraging tourism to Japan and purchases from NJ tourists, due to things being make more expensive upon exchange.<\/p>\n

So NHK was breathlessly reporting (live) from Narita Airport this morning how authorities had come up with a great wheeze to stimulate spending!<\/p>\n

Ready for it?<\/p>\n

“PREFERENTIAL RATE COUPONS!!”<\/p>\n

Meaning that if you hold one of these coupons (they provided a graphic with a big-nosed (of course) gaijin clutching this precious slip of paper), you would get a discount on your exchange from dollars (or whatever) into yen.<\/p>\n

And that preferential rate would be?<\/p>\n

Ready for it?…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,22,13,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-business-practices","category-cultural-issue","category-media","category-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}