we have 2 sorts of customer categories: employee and professional.

employees get a 20% discount on everything we sell.

professionals get a 10% discount on most of the things we sell, but not on meat or dairy items.

right now we have the customer categories set up with the discounts. back when we didn't sell food, it wasn't an issue. but now whenever we check out a professional customer, we have to manually erase the 10% discount from their meat and dairy purchases, which, of course, is a step that often gets forgotten.

i thought i could switch to using pricing levels, but i can't figure out an easy way to do it, and i'm not sure it's worth doing each product individually. plus, i wanted to set up rules so that new meat and dairy products would also not get discounts.

the only thing i could think to do is to set rules that say 'if this product is -not- meat or dairy, then give discount for this pricing level'. but we have a lot of classes that are meat and dairy, and i do not want to combine them. there are too many to just use the OR function. if i could just have a Class Contains ______ option, that would work, but apparently i don't have that option. i don't think setting up several rules will work either, since i'd be using an IS NOT function.

any ideas?

I would say pricing levels are the way to go.

As for setting up your rules, there are so many other filters/flags other than class that you can use, I'm sure you can find some commonality.

We have some rules for pricing levels that are based on margin so we're protected on very low margin items.