u/-Clayburn

I'm curious about the business reasoning here. I don't know if it's all over the country, but at our Sam's Club they make you take your cart through these AI video scanners, and the people at the door have scanners and check almost everything in the cart to see that it is on the receipt.

Meanwhile Walmart has self-checkout and all the person at the door does is sometime ask to see your receipt. If you want you can even ignore them and they won't do anything. Also, if they look at your receipt, they might note any big ticket items but they don't seem particularly observant.

This has been a nut I've been trying to crack for a while. I have a background in marketing, and have often had to prepare PowerPoint presentations and present them to audiences. Sometimes I had to present things other people put together, and sometimes my staff would have to present things I put together. This is where the kernel of the idea came from. I'm pretty good at improvising in presentations, and I enjoyed giving presentations that felt a bit off the cuff.

So originally I thought maybe there would be a way to make a game out of "PowerPoint Improv" as a training tool for my staff to give them experience presenting and help them learn to adapt. I could never figure out how to make it work, though. As a game, I wanted it to be fun and creative. I didn't want to just give them real presentations and have them rehash stuff we all sort of already know because that just turns into "rehearsal" which is already how people often train for presenting.

Skip to a decade later: I'm a big fan of panel shows, and I realize that maybe this gimmick would work in the world of panel shows. The challenge is still the same, though. How do you make a game out of it?

Have you seen anything like this? Do you have any ideas? The only thing I've seen that's close is Impractical Jokers where some tasks would involve them giving a presentation which they hadn't seen before. The "problem" there is that the audience they're presenting to believes it will be an authentic presentation, and it's very much not fun for them in the moment because of the embarrassment and awkwardness. I'm not opposed to pursuing something like that, but I would rather lean more toward traditional panel show format. I'm thinking something a bit like WILTY but instead of telling a story, you're showing a PowerPoint. The true/lie thing wouldn't work though since the point would be it's all bullshit/lie all the time.

Something that feels a bit in the right vein to me is QI. If you consider the screens behind them, it's sort of like a presentation and even though the host is reading scripted questions and facts, the "slides" often prompt discussion from the panel.

I'd appreciate some help here brainstorming this out. I want something where a person "presents" slides they haven't seen before, but to an audience that knows this, and somehow hilarity ensues.

I'm referring to unions or other authorities that might police the use of stage names. Generally they don't allow people to have the same name as a current member. That's why you end up with middle initials usually, since actors need to distinguish themselves from someone with the same first and last name that's already registered.

But what about Jr.? In the case of real life Juniors, most likely their parent is the one with the same name and probably don't mind their kid using it, especially since they named them. But what if they did mind? If Robert Downey had objected to his son using the name Robert Downey Jr, could he have prevented him from using it? And if not, then could anyone use Jr. as a stage name? Could I be Meryl Streep Jr for example? I'm guessing probably not, but what's the specific rule?

I realize I've not been minmaxing our purchases. I don't have the stamina for churning, so I'd just like to make sure our spending habits are as useful as they can be and we're using the right cards for everything. Open to getting new cards to cover a useful category.

Here is what we have:

• Chase Sapphire Reserve
• Chase Freedom Unlimited
• Chase Freedom
• Spark Business
• Disney Chase Visa
• Amazon Prime Store

We use the Amazon one exclusively for Amazon which has the 5%. I've been mistakenly using the CSR for gas, but mostly because that's just my go-to card. The two Freedom cards are my wife's, and I try to put most random stuff like bills and groceries on the Freedom Unlimited because it's 1.5% on everything else compared to the CSR's 1%. Sometimes we use the Sparks Business because of the 2% but we try to limit it to actual business expenses for accounting purposes. I only got the Disney one because we're going to Disney World soon and it had an offer. I've also thought about getting an American Airlines card but the CSR has travel perks already so it doesn't seem worth the extra hassle.

Most of our expenses are random bills (not all are able to be paid with a credit card without an added fee), groceries, gas and random business expenses (other than the ones the Sparks card is specifically for, for example I spend a lot on online ads for digital marketing work).

Looking at the CSR expenses YTD we have $3,400 on "Professional Services". These are mostly ads, domain registrations, etc. Stuff related to digital marketing work. I imagine this would be an easy one to move to a better card. Travel is at $2,970 which I believe is good for the CSR. Shopping is $1,890. Food and Drink is $1,660 (also good for CSR right?). Gas is $306 (this needs to move to another card probably). Health and wellness $147 (just because it's the default card I carry with me, since my wife has the others). Groceries at $60 (basically put all groceries on the Chase Freedom Unlimited so not much gets on the CSR.) Entertainment is only $32 which seems low but maybe we put most of that on the CFU too.

Edit: The travel category on the CSR seems a lot more limited now though. Things like public transit and rental cars don't seem to be included. Just hotels and airline tickets?