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.
Awesome deal!
Saw this one posted on the private PDX board. Too far away for me but a lot of people got in on it.