Nothing But The Tooth

So there's this sub joint near where I work, Capt. Sub. It's a chain but it still makes really good sandwiches. Better than Quizno's? Not really, but a very close second.

They used to have a sort of affinity program where you'd get a point for a half sub or two points for a full sub, and after ten points you could get a free half and twenty you'd get a free full sub. Buy ten, get one free, in other words. Then they changed the program; you get, I dunno, 5 points for every dollar you spend, 700 points nets you a free half-sub, and 1300 points a full sub. Seems like kind of a ripoff; it used to be like a coffee card, but now you have to spend a whoooole lot of money to get anything free. (Still, Quizno's doesn't give you anything free, so I guess you're still ahead of the game with the other place.)

I don't eat there that often, maybe once a month, if that, so it's going to be a while before I can get free food. I have 562 points, to be exact, and I know this, because I hung onto my last receipt, which says, and I quote,

This is your 562th Capt's Club Po

Five hundred and sixty-tooth?

Now, I used to write software, and I can understand that there's only so much room on a line (33 characters, to be exact). But it isn't that hard to add a couple of lines of code so that things like "562th" don't happen. I can see how it did, I suppose: if you're playing the odds, "-th" is the commonest ordinal suffix, occurring in 73 of the 100 possible numbers from first up to hundredth. (The suffix "-st" is used 9 times: 1st, and then every ten numbers from 21st through 91st. The same is true of "-nd" and "-rd". That's 27. All the rest are "-th".)

And even that's unnecessary. How easy it would have been to code

You have 562 Capt's Club Points

and circumvent the problem altogether. It would even leave room for that 4th digit once it passes 1000. They could even shove a comma into the post-999 number; there's still room.

Isn't thinking about such things what they pay programmers to do?