Maybe more for speculative discussion. My immediate reaction is there are so many people who never take the train, that it would be trivially easy for regular travellers to get them to get a free Railcard which they could then illicitly borrow, once they had reached the limit on the number of tickets they could buy on their own free Railcard.
Road planners clearly have a similar thought process, hence TfL introducing peak and off-peak tolls on the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels and talking about variable road user charging aimed at nudging people away from travelling at peak times.
It's many things, which is why the scheme has got so confusing. It's a targeted subsidy for certain groups (young people, disabled), it's a marketing tool for encourage off peak travel (young people, senior, Network), to form habits (young people), it's a bulk buy discount (Two together, family) and a political move (veterans, 26-30, Forces).
Being controversial, I suspect "ordinary people" can afford to travel by train about as much as they were able to for the majority of the railways' existence - and the time period most of us can remember was more of an exception than the rule. What has changed is people's expectations of how far "normal" travel is (of course aided by the speeding up of journeys and increase in train frequencies) . For most "ordinary people", for example, a day out in London from further much further out than Reading (or similar distance on the appropriate mainline) would have been something really special to be saved up for until pretty recently. In general there has been a rise in people's expectations in terms of what is "normal" in terms of affordability. That's not to say I don't think there should be greater subsidy (particularly of "local" journeys) - there should.
Weekdays, off peak, the majority of the 31 - 60 bracket will be working!
Mere puff is the legal term stemming from a judgement on a claim along the lines of "The Best Chipshop in the Country". Don't recall the details.
Actually work, or work in the office? For example, I am planning on a productive day at my desk in the spare room tomorrow. I'll be working, but not doing Monday's normal commute.
Thank you. My mother said it was Lord Denning. That was always a good guess for judgements in the 1970s!
Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Not exactly an objective basis for such a major change! After all, not many people my mother knows well work (for a wage /salary) at all. (She’s 84)
But Domino's don't restrict their deals to people with certain characteristics (although you could argue app-only deals do exclude some people).
Perhaps a bit more harsh than I intended and the sarcasm didn’t come across. I didn’t mean to imply that people are literally suckers, moreso that both systems seem set up to extract lots of money from people who don’t or can’t spend time optimising their spend. All this seems to be designed to give the customer the impression that they get a “good deal” when in fact the “discount” had been anticipated by the seller all along. I think both systems are deliberately manipulative.
I would suggest that the poster depicted in post #1 and similar variants are poorly designed if the small print at the bottom can so easily be hidden by the frame in which it is to be displayed.
