A few years ago, I got a pickup order from Kroger. When I got home, I noticed an item was missing. I went on the website to view the receipt to see if I had been charged and to request a refund if necessary. The receipt wasn’t available so I checked the next day. Still no receipt. Same the next day. I checked my AMEX account and the charge was “pending”. The next day the order had disappeared entirely. The charge on AMEX had also disappeared. I got about $70 worth of free groceries.
My old tractor stripped splines inside the transmission and had to go away for a very expensive repair at the dealership. When I went to pay for it, there was some error on the bill relating to the labor part, apparently piling onto some series of billing mistakes the people there had been arguing about. “No labor charge!” said the person handling my bill. I questioned this, saying I didn’t intend to take advantage of an innocent mistake, but they insisted. This saved me more than $600.
Not very exciting, but definitely useful-
I order cat litter from Chewy, mostly, and was trying a new-to-me kind of clumping crystal litter. I’d tried one bag and thought it was pretty good, so ordered 2 more to start to transition the cats over (I have like 8 litterboxes). The stuff isn’t cheap so if they were going to rebel I didn’t want to be out a ton of money.
My shipment arrives in a huge, heavy box. I also get canned food too, so I didn’t think all that much about it. Come to find out the sent me NINE bags of litter! When I notified them they said just keep it or donate it, no worries.
I’m not saying no to $100 of free litter in a house full of cats!
(FWIW, it’s Chewy’s own Frisco brand clumping crystal litter. Stuff is amazing. I had electricians in the house not long after I started using it and they said they were surprised I had a cat at all, never mind 16!)
My wife and I used to joke about “When do we get into Crazy Cat Lady territory?”
The answer: One more cat than we already have.
But 16 has definitely crossed that line–and your title embraces the fact!
I’d love to visit a home with 16 cats, though maybe wouldn’t want to feed/clean up/care for such a crew.
I guess I’ve gotten many freebies in life, but not many accidentally. The one example I could quote as being “best” would be when I was flying from Tokyo to LA on All Nippon Airways.
I had already been assigned a seat before I arrived at Narita Airport to check-in, but wasn’t too happy with what I had been given, a seat towards the back of the plane. At check-in, I asked if a better seat had opened up.
I was told I could be put up farther toward the front in coach (which I prefer because it makes for a quicker exit and getting to immigration faster) but it was an aisle seat, not a window (which I usually prefer to help sleep on the long transpacific flight).
There had been a somewhat last minute equipment change to a different seat configuration on the same type of aircraft, a Boeing 777. This configuration had premium economy and I was asked if I didn’t mind sitting there with the stipulation that I wouldn’t be given a premium economy meal (there weren’t any loaded as originally there wasn’t supposed to be a premium economy cabin.) I jumped at the chance because even without a premium economy meal, the seat offered expanded pitch (aka “leg room”). From having worked in the travel industry, I knew how much extra such a seat would normally cost and IIRC, the seat next to me remained vacant, giving me extra space there as well!
Holy cow! If that was the 60s or early 70s that’s the store I used to get Estes engines from.
I think the name was Hobbies and Arts.
A number of years back a friend and I regularly ordered pizza from Marcos, to the point where several of the drivers knew us. When placing orders online one of the options was how you wanted the pizza cut. We always got the wedge cut, 8 slices. One time when the driver was giving us the pizza he immediately apologized; he had checked the pizza before bringing it up to the house and saw that it had been cut “tavern-style” (into squares). We said that was okay, but he insisted that he was going to report the error to the store when he got back. A little over an hour later the doorbell rings, and it’s our driver with another pizza, cut into wedges.
I have a lava lamp that needs a specific type of bulb. I recently ordered two bulbs via Amazon and received 2 packages of bulbs containing 10 bulbs each. So, I got 40 bulbs for the price of 2 bulbs. I tried to explain that via the web site, but they never even bothered to respond.
When I moved to my house, my parents gave me a gift of two outdoor lounge chairs. They arrived, flat packed, and I saw that one of the chair backs had a broken brace. So I contacted the company, they sent me a replacement and told me to do whatever I wanted with the broken one.
After putting the two good ones together, I decided to try and repair the broken one. Scrap piece of pressure treated wood, tracing the broken piece, a few screws and holes and re-secured hardware bits and I had a third chair.
Back when I was a teenager in the 90’s, I went to Best Buy to get my first set of real speakers. They had advertised in the local paper for a pair of small bookshelf JBL speakers for like $75 each. It was a lot of money to me at the time but I was really into music and needed something that could take advantage of the new receiver I had purchased earlier. When I got to the store they were unfortunately out of stock however.
The salesman however said that the sales manager had authorized them to substitute a slightly better and more expensive bookshelf speaker to those who wanted to buy the advertised speakers for the same price. I was very excited to get an even better speaker than what I had planned but it turns out that those had ALSO just gone out of stock. So, the salesman, without consulting the manager, then said I could substitute the next level JBL speaker they had. These turned out to be full size floor standing speakers that retailed for something like $400 a piece. I suspected there was some kind of confusion here, since even a stupid teenager could figure out a sales manager would likely never ok that kind of substitution, so I paid for the speakers as quickly as I could and got out of there. Best speakers I ever owned!
Funny! I just bought a reproduction of the Estes BoMARC and it came with…a free reproduction Mosquito!
You definitely got the better deal.
As for me, I booked on-line a hotel in Colorado for a trip. When I got there, they overcharged. Even though I had the reservation, they charged me an extra $20. I complained and complained and finally the corporate office refunded the $20. But when the credit card statement came, I never had any charge for that hotel.
So they effectively paid me $20 to stay there.
I was taking my truck to get the transmission rebuilt. Well, it was in such sad shape it died on the way, and I called they shop to tow it. They sent an independent tow truck, not one from the shop. I asked about paying, and they said they could just add the towing fee to the final bill. Spoiler alert: they forgot. Oh well, knowing what transmission shops charge, they probably still came out ahead.
I moved to a new town, electronically transferring my remaining balance at my old bank to my new one. Only about $500…
Got the first statement from the new bank, and the old one had transferred said amount twice. My honesty almost made me call them up, but I figured they’d just perfunctorily delete the 2nd one from their records to get their books to balance, and be done with it, and I’d likely just get some flunkie who wouldn’t know what to do about it anyway.
I’m having trouble thinking of my best accidental freebie, so here is my most dystopian accidental freebie.
The new Intuit Dome in LA uses facial recognition to handle concession stand purchases. The idea is that you just grab stuff, and I assume Palantir or Clearview, along with the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley charge your account.
I’m told that as long as I am the one that removes food from the case it will be tied to me.
Go into the concession zone with my wife and kid, and I grab them each a hot dog and drink, hand it to them, and then we leave. I only get charged for one hot dog.
The best? Hmmm
Subaru of America corporation compensated me for a faulty media center console issue. They had my brand new outback for weeks and weeks trying to figure it out. Of course they provided loaner cars too. To make amends they paid one months car payment $800, and sent a $500 check for parts and accessories which I used to have them install a hitch. Great I was satisfied
Then a box arrived, it was a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner courtesy of SOA. Now I was really satisfied.
5 years later that Dyson needs a new battery. Car is running strong still under warranty.
Could be the same place. Can’t remember the name from that far back.
I hiked the Milford Track in NZ, which is offered in two versions; guided and unguided. We did it unguided, and after the 4 day hike we did a boat tour of Milford Sound. That boat is run by the same people who run the guided hike. The bartender on the boat opened a bottle of complementary champagne to serve our little group - then realized that we were not on the guided tour. She paused for a second, considered our ragged troop, and just poured us each a glass.
6 years ago, I ordered a large rug for my family room and received a much smaller rung in the same pattern. After sending in a pic of the tag on the rug, they sent me the proper size rug and told me I could “dispose” of the original one as I liked. Needless to say, it went into a guest bedroom where it fit quite well. Really tied the room together.
Also, I got free basic cable in the apartment I occupied during my internship. I was in a small rural town and would have gone crazy if not for that.
Backyard Baseball on a CD in a box of cereal. Hadn’t heard of it before, and didn’t buy the cereal to get it. But my kids and I ended up playing that game together for close to a decade.
My best accidental freebie was probably a laptop from work. We used to have a policy of rotating out computers every three years. The company used to buy all the computers and would frequently auction off the old computers to staff. But at some point they switched from buying to leasing. So I got my new laptop, got everything transferred over from the old laptop, and carried the old laptop to my manager’s office.
“I can’t take that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Since we lease instead of buy now, we don’t have an asset disposal policy anymore.”
“So what am I supposed to do with this?”
“Stick it in a desk drawer. Somebody will eventually find it after you’ve left.”
So I stuck it in a desk drawer, and there it sat for about a year. I couldn’t use it, because IT had dropped it from the asset list and wouldn’t allow it on the network.
We had a woman who did our asset management, and about every six months she would send out a spreadsheet listing all the equipment that had been assigned to you and was unaccounted for. The laptop never showed up on this list. After a couple of rounds of this, I realized the company had no idea I still had this laptop. So I took it home. I wiped the hard drive and installed Ubuntu, and it was my “ripping mp3s ftom vinyl” machine for years until it died.