Balham pool has raised the price of a non-member swimming session from £3.05 to £3.17. What kind of madness is this? It’s such a specific and inconvenient sum of money to pay. Why not just go the whole hog and make it £3.20? Have they found that some people get to the ticket desk and say “£3.20? I’m not paying that for a swim. I demand a three pence discount or I am taking my custom elsewhere.”
Or couldn’t they have just pegged it a £3.15? Does the extra 2p a person make such a difference. Let’s say a hundred non-members use the pool a day (which I don’t think for a moment they do, but I’ve set the figure deliberately high). Balham pool makes an extra two pounds a day. I can imagine the evil manager of the leisure complex sitting in his office, cavorting naked on his desk, covered with both those pound coins. Having said that it’s a massive £728 a year. Over a ten year period, presuming 100 non-members come swimming every day, the manager could afford to buy a fairly good second-hand car. Maybe he’s not as stupid as I imagine him to look.
Or maybe he is. Because if he’d made the ticket price £3.19, he’d have that car in half the time. If he’d chosen a figure like £3.25, he could have had a brand new car within the next couple of years. But he didn’t want to look greedy and went for £3.17. Of course, his plan has back-fired because £3.17 is such an unusual and wrong amount to ask for, that it immediately raises suspicion. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to realise this is an elaborate long term scheme to buy a reasonably reliable second-hand car. I just hope that it won’t be long before the authorities catch on and the manager is imprisoned and prices can be brought down to the less irritating sum of £3.15.
I go swimming around 3 times a week, about 35 weeks of the year. So I would save £2.10 a year. Imagine how many years it’s going to take me to get that car.
