Word: nickel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...four-day trip, the New York City executive figured he would pay around $180. But Blumenfeld's final bill came to a more daunting $253.30. Says he: "You go to a rental-car agency, and you don't know what it's going to cost you. They nickel and dime you to death...
...kidding? Too depressing, lacks an upbeat ending, and no one has ever paid a nickel to see anything about South America. Next...
...term bill last semester--$8000, plus two dollars for lost keys, one dollar for the library, and another two dollars to cover the cost of giving me a copy of my transcript. Now, no intensely self-respecting institution such as Harvard would ever demean itself so far as to nickel-and-dime the same students who pay over $16,000 each year to live in overcrowded dorms. Unless tradition was involved...
...tradition of nickel-and-diming the students began at Harvard's inception. The then-president of the University decided, as an April Fools joke, to pretend to charge the students for lost i.d. cards, keys, transcript requests, and every other little thing imaginable. When the president then passed away under mysterious circumstances during a closed Board of Overseers meeting, the information that the charges were meant as a joke somehow never surfaced, though today everyone at Harvard is aware of the real story. The tradition of inflicting petty charges on students has become such a part of the Harvard mystique...
Such a megabuck scale is foreign to the most colorful of the can pickers, the loners who scrounge through garbage cans around picnic grounds, sports arenas and office buildings. They turn in empties for a refund, usually a nickel a can, in the nine states that have bottle and can deposit laws. In other areas they can sell their refuse for 28 cents to 40 cents...