It’s basically a game of luck – the only skill is throwing the dice. But it’s all luck in that how your game goes is determined purely by dice. And it’s completely different from “The Landlord’s Game” which is meant to teach about the evils of monopolies and what controlling the housing market can accomplish.
I just use the charity gift wrap store at the mall. Saves the problem of wrapping presents (I’m terrible at it), having people peak or find your hiding spots between purchasing and wrapping, and it helps the less fortunate.
The sole purpose of the signatures is acceptance of the credit card contract. You sign the card to indicate you accepted the cardholder agreement. You sign the slip to indicate you will pay the amount shown per the cardholder agreement (i.e., payment terms, interest rates, etc). That’s the whole point of the signature fields. Like any contract, any signature is valid – the illiterate would make an “X” which is why the signature line is almost always indicated with an X.
The “You’re the product” thing is really more of a modern invention where places like Google, Meta (Facebook), etc offer their stuff for free because they monetize their users in other ways – selling ads, for example. It’s where all the tracking information comes into play – if you watch a certain kind of video, perhaps you’re the demographic that would be interested in a certain kind of ad.
I used to do it myself, but I now use the charity gift wrap service at a local mall. They help the local food bank so those less fortunate than me can at least get something. I’ve done it for years so they all recognize me when they set up their boot at the mall (the mall sponsors the space). I used to use a different mall, but they stopped doing it and that mall went with a non-charity gift wrap service so I went elsewhere.
Apparently we were told those rawhide bones were bad for dogs so we stopped giving it to them, no matter how funny they appeared (we had sticks that they liked to poke us with, or silly goofy with it hanging from their mouth like a cigarette). So we stopped giving it to them…
Note that Canada Post (as well as USPS and every other service) delivers to every address in Canada. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc, do not. What happens with surprising regularity is if you’re in a rural location, those companies will hand off the package to Canada Post to do the delivery – they will not actually deliver it themselves as it’s too expensive. There are many cases where people have found this out the hard way where they ship something by UPS or FedEx, and it’s held up by Canada Post because they refuse to deliver it all the way. People used to trick Amazon into delivering to rural locations by faking out their postal codes – Canada Post became more strict about ensuring addresses were correct which forced Amazon to pay more to deliver to those addresses and caused Amazon to add surcharges for those customers (too expensive to use their own delivery service, and now Canada Post was charging them more for rural delivery).
It’s basically a game of luck – the only skill is throwing the dice. But it’s all luck in that how your game goes is determined purely by dice. And it’s completely different from “The Landlord’s Game” which is meant to teach about the evils of monopolies and what controlling the housing market can accomplish.