The choice of bills is an interesting interpretation, but since the bills each customer puts down are not mentioned, it shouldn’t be part of the solution. There’s no reason to assume the second customer used ones.
It’d be like answering it by saying “the second customer was deaf and wrote out his preference on the $10 bill*” or “there was one each of all the dogs, and there was a third customer who was in the store and bought the last last labrador, after the first customer bought the last poodle.” You can come up with dozens of “solutions” of this nature.
BraheSilver’s first solution sticks to the facts, only the clerk wouldn’t have mentioned a labrador as a choice if none were available. (And all three dogs have to be $10 or less, or the clerk wouldn’t have offered the choice.
The big question is: is the riddle correctly posted? A slight misstep can turn it from clever to meaningless (like “what words end with -gry?”)
Seriously, what’s wrong with the answer that the second guy put down his $10 and said “may I please have an alsation”? All it says is that the shop assistant didn’t utter a word.
But that’s the thing with these riddles. You need to make some kind of assumption. Whether it’s that the guy was blind, he paid with certain denominations, or that he said “I’ll have an alsation please”.
It means that any answer can be valid as long as it fits with the meagre information supplied. It also makes these riddles kind of pointless, you need to choose the answer that the riddler has decided is “correct”.
I think the denomination answer is the type of answer most commonly given for these things.
The guide dog answer doesn’t work because labradors are commonly used as guide dogs.
The “I’ll have an alsation please” answer is perfectly valid.
the denomination of the bills answer IS a possible correct answer to the puzzle as stated. No other theory so far has been proposed that does not require additional information to be true.
OK, let us say this- the Poodle is $9, the Alastion is $10, and the Lab is $8 (and they are so priced in the window). First man puts down a $10 bill- he could want any of of the 3- plus perhaps change- and in fact he does expect $1 in change. Next customer comes in, and lays down 10X$1 bills. The only logical reason (“in Puzzle-land” as Scarlett says) to hand the clerk 10X$1 bills is that he is buying a $10 dog, not a $9 or $8 dog. OK?
Now yes, the riddle doesn’t mention the prices or types of payment- that the PUZZLE part. And of course, you could still be wrong- like in the case of the “all directions are south and he shot a bear- what color was the bear?” riddle. The bear could be green, of course. But indeed, if all directions are South- in “Puzzle-land” the bear must be a Polar bear (which actually would be starving and ost at the actual North pole- but… they are *Artic * animals yes, but that doesn’t mean you’d find any within a few miles of the actual Pole. But you could argue that the hunter had somebody drop ship him in a cinnamon bear- so he shot a red bear! :rolleyes:
Thus, the denomination answer is most likely the desired answer- but there are other “right” answers, OK?
RealityChuck — that answer is perfectly acceptable. This seems a pretty typical “lateral thinking” puzzle, and the method to the answer is also fairly typical of these. If you haven’t seen these types of riddles (and oh do I hate them), just google the term or, heck, I’m pretty sure we’ve even had threads of these in the past.
So if your take is that it can be any answer, even if it depends on things that aren’t mentioned in the puzzle, there isn’t any “answer.” There can be dozens of them.
So the customer could have written his preference on the bill.
Or he could have given exact change.
Or the clerk was a telepath.
Or the second customer was a male alsation and the puppy was a female.
Of the second customer was a friend of the clerk and told him the day before he was going to come in and buy the alsatian.
Or anything you choose. Which makes any answer completely trivial and pointless. It makes any answer right, but any answer wrong.
The problem with the antecedent, however, is a fair solution. It, at least, sticks with what is given in the problem. It does seem to say that the clerk never uttered a word, but that does not rule out the customer, and it introduces nothing new to come up with an answer.
Yes, that’s right, Chuck. There usually is more than one acceptable answer to this type of puzzle. Here’s a classic lateral thinking puzzle:
A man walks into a bar and asks the barman for a glass of water. The barman pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man says ‘Thank you’ and walks out.
Why?
The man had hiccups. The barman recognized this from his speech and drew the gun in order to give him a shock. It worked and cured the hiccups - so the man no longer needed the water.
This is a pretty typical example. Our OP’s question is in the spirit of the lateral thinking puzzle, and so is that answer. I think it works fine.
The answer was this:-
The dogs were differently priced, for example $10 for the Alsatian $9 for the poodle and $8 for the Labrador. The first man could of given the shop assistant a $10 bill, whereas the second could of given the shop assistant a $5 bill and 5 $1 coins…thanx MC Master of Ceremonies and everyone else!
