Poll of the Day > Do you consider abusing a coupon for signing up for email news letters to be bad

(+) Yeah! (+)

I have signed up on my personal and my personal professional emails.

They have a carry out special with multiple items for under 12.99, so I got the Chicken Alfredo and "Double it for 5"(as in they straight up give you a full second one) and then I also get an appetizer to throw it over the 30 mark. The Chicken Alfredo is loaded so I can't finish it. So I eat the App and some of the Alfredo, finish the Alfredo as a snack and then eat the second for an entirely different meal.

share the food with friends telling them where it's from, that way the ad technically did reach several different people

Nothing wrong with it.

If it's a large corporation, they have the resources to prevent abuse if they really care about it and wouldn't think twice about abusing you similarly if the opportunity arose, so go for it. If it's a small business that you like, it's more likely that the potential for abuse was an oversight and they stand to lose a meaningful amount of money over it, so not only should you not abuse it, you should alert them to the issue so they can fix it. If it's a small business you don't like, meh.

No? There was a period of time where I would enter dozens of Star Trek Online giveaways to get the rewards because you could game the system and get the rewards.
If it's legal, in your power, and it interests you, why not do it?

I wouldn't consider it bad. In almost every scenario, you are still likely just reducing the profits of a business rather than causing them to incur a loss.

Rasmoh posted...

I wouldn't consider it bad. In almost every scenario, you are still likely just reducing the profits of a business rather than causing them to incur a loss.

The general rule of thumb in food service is to have ingredient costs and labour costs each make up about 30% of the sale price of an item. That's quite variable (the main reason fast food places push combos so hard is that burgers are like 50-60% food cost while fries and drinks are like 5-10%, so combining them to reduce the average is a big deal), but you generally won't see more than ~30-40% of the sale price of any food item left to cover overhead (including the utility costs to make it) and provide profits, and the overall profit margin for food service rarely exceeds 5%. $10 off a $30 order pretty much eats all of the individual items' margins; they're basically giving all of that away for publicity's sake, and that does constitute a loss.

Now, that becomes less true for larger orders, and in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of people aren't going to abuse the offer and they will most likely recover their loss from the new business it brings in. That's why I say it doesn't matter for larger businesses (who can absorb the small-scale loss quite comfortably and still come out ahead) but does for small businesses (for whom the loss will be a greater percentage of their overall revenue even if it's only a couple of people abusing it).

No, they are sending out the coupons to get more business, and you are giving them that business. So sounds fair to me.

I used to have a coupon for Papa Johns that was for 50% off your entire order (no longer works unfortunately), but they had some glitch in their system where you could apply it twice, which to my benefit resulted in free orders. So for a few months I was just getting non-stop free pizzas. They eventually fixed the glitch, but the coupon remained active for a few years before it "expired".

fettster777 posted...

I used to have a coupon for Papa Johns that was for 50% off your entire order (no longer works unfortunately), but they had some glitch in their system where you could apply it twice, which to my benefit resulted in free orders. So for a few months I was just getting non-stop free pizzas. They eventually fixed the glitch, but the coupon remained active for a few years before it "expired".

Nice. A few years back, Chipotle in Oregon had a big e.coli scare and to try and bring business back in, they mailed free meal coupons to households around where their restaurants were located. I was living in an Apartment Complex with centrally located mailboxes at the time. All the people who didn't want their free meal set their coupons on top of the mailboxes for recycling.

I had free Chipotle for months because of that.