So you find a supermarket, or a chemists shop, on the way to work, and every morning you go in and buy a bar of soap. Make it a really cheap, or obscure brand that no-one else in their right mind would buy. Then, go up to the counter and pay for the soap, and then return it.

Make up some suitably odd reason, like it's performance art, or an experiment in the psychology of consumerism, or whatever, but make sure they keep the soap.

It's up to you whether you take the money back or not, but it'll be less hassle to leave it with them.

The next day, go back in and do it all over again, *making sure* you get the same assistant.

And then do it every day for a month.

Then, one day go in, buy your soap, and as they ring the money through the till, *really clumsily* substitute the block of soap for a block of lard wrapped up (badly) in the soap wrapper. Go through your usual speil about "the experience of purchase", and then leave.

Of course, you can't be there for the punchline, which is when the assistant takes a look inside the wrapper and then thinks "for a whole month?".

But the idea amuses me greatly.

Bo"and how many bars would he have to unwrap before he worked it out?"urne