DEAL DEAD – That time a grocery store was discounting $100 off a $500 MGC

Introduction

A reader shared this with me on Friday afternoon.  This East coast grocery chain had a programming error whereby they should have taken $10 off $50 or more, but ended up programming the promo to be $10 off every $50, thus a $500 MGC was ringing up with a $100 discount.  I wanted so badly to do another Smart & Final run, but 1) I figured it would die overnight and 2) flying out to the East coast is a bit far.  The error was corrected Saturday afternoon, but not after my reader put my Smart & Final results to shame.

Why don’t I give out the name?  There’s no need to since this was a one-off, but you should be able to figure it out.  Am I going to kill future mistakes like this by writing about it?  Uhh no, don’t be naive.  The tens of thousands of dollars they lost is more of a deterrent than a blog post on a small web site.

Lessons Learned

I don’t think this deal hit any blogs or even any forums.  It was interesting to see how long the deal would last w/o any publicity, and I think 16 hours was very optimistic.  Although to be honest, I thought best case it would last until Monday morning.  I’m sure some programmer was woken up on Saturday morning to fix the mistake ASAP!  Even if word got out, I still think it would have lasted the same amount of time (maybe a few hours shorter.)

How do you get wind of deals like this?  Networking folks.