Given the phrasing of the article, it sounds like an "honest" mistake in Pepsi's case. The intent to distribute two prizes likely means the number was predetermined or that it was to be selected from a small pool of numbers that had a low run.
On the other hand, the Hoover example was based upon pure dishonesty. They made a claim, put in a bunch of rules to disqualify people, took steps to slant the rules in their favour, then hoped it would be enough to win the numbers game. Hope because they were relying upon assumptions that were very much out of their control.
Reading this and how unprofitable the offer was it almost seems like they (i.e., executives) intentionally tanked the company. The inspiration for Ted Lasso? :)
"The math was concerning: On the sale of a £119 vacuum cleaner, Hoover made a profit of £30. The two free fights that came with it were worth at least £600. This meant that each customer who followed through with the promotion cost Hoover £570."
Yeah the white washing of this extremely clear cut case of fraud is journalistic malpractice. "Oh look at these cheeky things Hoover did to try to "fleece" their customers in a flagrant attempt to breach contract." This is like the toy yoda story.
Most "sales promotions" in the 90's were little more than fraud.
Most of us remember the period where almost everything in computer stores were "free after rebate." "Emachine 1997 model FREE AFTER REBATE", "Pack of 50 CDR FREE AFTER REBATE".
The rebate involved you filling out a form with the original proof of purchase, sending it off, and either never hearing from them again or having it denied. "Sorry, wrong receipt, send us the real one" but it was already gone.
Now, I assume anything with a rebate is fraud. The insight from this article is that we were right.
I don’t recall ever getting one denied. Maybe I was lucky but those CD rebates were huge for me as a kid to have infinite supply of media to write content to. Music, games, apps, etc.
Yep, Same, I've filled out probably 25+ rebates in my life and I always got the rebate, eventually. You have to make sure you read and follow the fine print though - the instructions are very specific. The GP probably didn't read the fine print.
I still have several spindles of CD-Rs (and later DVD-Rs) that were free (or maybe $1) after rebate.
Similar 'cashback' deals exist even now... You rarely get 100% back. Often there isn't too much fine print either, and the payout rate is ~90% in my experience.
Sometimes they insist in paying in amazon vouchers or some other 'almost cash' currency.
Although, generally speaking, Amazon and other general purpose large retailers (Walmart, Home Depot) have figured that out. When I get rewards points of some sort with an option to convert to various gift cards, the best deal is always with the specialty retailers but then you need to make a point of using the card for something you really want/need as opposed to just adding some dollars to your Amazon account.
Oh, you don't have to tell me, I have made several hundred dollars on these deals - I only do money makers (where the cash back is more than the cost of the subscription). Plus one of my friends can always use the subscription stuff and are thrilled to get the items if it's not something I'd use. (Such as makeup & dog toys). I've always had the correct payout. I have a browser that I solely use for cash back websites.
I usually find out about these deals on https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ which is run by what seems like fantastic, non-scammy, people and its the only credit card blog that I know of that's independent. The rest shill for referrals.
You missed the first part, which was “read the instructions”.
I worked at a store that heavily promoted these things to get foot traffic. The only people with problems were the people lining up on Sunday meaning to fill a cart with shit they didn’t need - or even know what it was to get it for “free”.
I remember one guy, who punched me in the mouth, screaming that he bought a scam video card “it doesn’t even play tapes” for $14.95 and didn’t get his $20 rebate for whatever reason. I think that he didn’t include the UPC code or something. The medical bills after I threw him out the window, the arrest and fine were a lot more than $14.95.
I used the free cd offers all of the time to get CD-Rs… we’d make custom mix CDs for the folks in our dorm.
Defenestration is a term coined to describe a political event in Prague but I'm not sure the word itself is Czech but is arguably French, Latin or English in origin.
> Though already existing in Middle French, the word defenestrate ("out of the window") is believed to have first been used in English in reference to the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of a window of the Hradčany Castle and wrote an extensive apologia explaining their action.
Well I guess it depends on how you attribute words to languages. In Czech language it's standard practice to compose words with Latin stems. The word was originally written by a Czech person in a Czech language text using specialized Czech grammar for integration of Latin stems.
The prefix de- is used in Czech normally since forever and to this day (originally Latin though), the stem fenestra is Latin (not normally used in Czech), and the suffix -ace is Czech (Slavic origin).
BTW the quote you posted says the first usage in English language was in reference to the Czech text which actually coined it (thus the English text adopted it), not that it's English in origin.
> The prefix de- is used in Czech normally since forever and to this day
It's only used in loan words. Like "depilace" is a normally used loanword in Czech, non-loan word variant would be "odchlupeni". But "dechlupeni" (using "de-" instead of "od-" + native Czech word) would be completely nonsensical.
Claiming that "defenestrace" is originally a Czech word seems absurd to me. It might have been "invented" in Czech lands, but clearly from the latin form.
Hmm, a lot of Czech words aren't actually Czech, then. I think that makes even less sense. The fact is the Czech language loans heavily from many different languages (Latin being one of the top donors) - but that doesn't mean we speak a mix of languages in one sentence.
The prefix de- is not used only in loanwords, you can construct new words with it just fine. It doesn't sound right in your example but that doesn't mean it's nonsense.
Defenestratio is not a Latin word, you wouldn't describe the act like that as a Latin speaker. You'd say something involving the words "de fenestra", but definitely not as one word.
It was the Czech person who first combined the Czech/Latin prefix, the Latin stem and the Czech/Slavic suffix in a decidedly Czech sentence.
> Listing some examples would strengthen your argument immensely.
You said one yourself. Nobody would say it because there's already a better way to say that, but everybody would understand the meaning and the grammar is fine.
Even if you're right about that, it still doesn't make the word Latin. Latin speakers wouldn't say it as one word, and there would also be a verb in a Latin sentence - "de fenestra" by itself is nonsense.
(I had the displeasure of studying Latin in school)
Note that all Latin speakers in that time period spoke Latin as their second (third...) language, and it was pretty common to see influence of other (mother) languages onto the used Latin. It wouldn't be surprising if e.g. a German native speaker (where such word concoctions are common place) coined such a Latin word.
It would also be unsurprising to see a native speaker of classical Latin coin such a Latin word. defenestro and defenestratio are perfectly compatible with the normal methods of word formation in classical Latin, which very rarely forms compound nouns, but which forms compounds of verbs with prepositional prefixes all the time. (Just in that last sentence, you can see the ghostly remains of perfectus [thoroughly-done], compono [with-put], praepositio [before-putting], and praefixus [before-fastened], all impeccably classical. You can also see compatior [with-endure], which does not seem to have existed in classical Latin, but is obviously derived in exactly the same way as the others.)
Do you have sources or references for any of this? I can't find any sources that dig into by who or in what text "defenstrate" was originally coined. You say it is in reference to "the Czech text" but don't clarify which text you qre talking about? The quote is posted makes no reference to any text...
The guy jumped me as I retreated and got tossed away from the crowd. (Hell I was making $4.50/hr + spiffs, not there to fight people) Fortunately, I spent most of my teenage years doing farm work, and it was all caught on camera.
The cops thought it was great. My boss not so much. The whole thing was absurd - an adult attacking a 19 year old over a few dollars.
That's likely to depend on at least a) the height of the window - a first floor window will be treated very differently than a tenth floor one - and b) the distance from the altercation to the window.
I forget the name but during the dot-com era there was a company who sold stuff like TVs at vastly inflated prices (something like 10x retail) to consumers on the premise that they could get a 100% rebate by mailing in a form thus making the purchase "for free".
Their business model was based on the assumption that a percentage of customers would forget to do this. Unfortunately, when hundreds or thousands of $ is on the line, people were very diligent! Unsurprisingly that company didn't last long.
Yeah, it baffles me that whoever did the planning for this thought that "making it cumbersome to fill out" would work the same as for, say, a 5% rebate on a small purchase vs. when the rebate is worth thousands of dollars.
I wonder if the decision-maker could have been wealthy enough that thousands of dollars felt insignificant to them. At some point, you lose sight of how much things cost, because the answer is almost always "not much".
Reminds me of Jessica Walter's character in Arrested Development: "It's a banana, Michael - how much could it cost? Ten dollars?"
Actually it's pretty genius. They probably made a killing, they went out being 80 million in the hole due to unpaid rebates and ended up paying out something like 2 cents on the dollar. I'm sure they got decent salaries and made money from upstream purchases.
Assuming no one here went to jail this is essentially a legal way to run a ponzi scheme.
If the buyer didn't care how much things cost, they'd buy the $500 TV at the shop, not through some crazy "$500 TV for $5000" scheme.
Rich people aren't idiots, I think the target customer for this thing is someone who's so price sensitive that they'll go to huge lengths to get a TV for free.
I got so much stuff I didn't need from them. I filled my entire dining table with stuff, and got my family to help me with an assembly line style UPC cutting and pasting operation.
I even scripted their website to auto-generate the rebate form.
The final batch never paid out, but I was able to file a credit card chargeback for most, but not all, of it.
I scripted that too. I had to print and fax around 400 pages of documentation to the credit card company. (Print directly to fax either didn't exist then, or at least I didn't have it.)
It's been how many years? And I still have stuff from them in my house, some in use, some just brand new in a box.
I was getting 1.5% cashback from the credit card I used, and everything was completely free.
I got most of my rebates at Frys back, but tried to avoid those purchases because of the hassle. I will never forget though the rebate that Microsoft refused to honor for the joystick I bought as a kid.
I bought a lot of stuff with rebates and I almost always got a check after a very long wait. Sometimes you had to call the number to make them send it out. It was fine when I didn’t make much money but after a while it was too much hassle.
And that is the point: price discrimination. For some 22 dollars is expensive, so they will do some work for the 12-14 dollar rebate. People making good monies won't care too much, or not at all.
I had about a 95% success rate. As a broke student in the early naughties I got almost everything tech FAR. CompUSA and Frys (pour one out) were especially good. I miss the cameraderie of the Black Friday Frys line.
I don't know about the nineties, but nearly every single rebate offer I've ever filled out I've gotten the money promised. Sometimes it takes a while but most of them are online and you just fill in your bank account information. Takes at most a couple minutes. Some random amount of months later you get a deposit in your account.
I also try to do any of those class action suits I qualify for. Those are a little more hit or miss but it's about the same time investment of a simple form, but usually those take a lot longer to get money. Got a check for 3 bucks for buying chips at some point in the past couple years, but it was really nice getting hundreds of dollars put into my bank account from Facebook a few months back after filing a claim years ago and forgetting about it.
Not quite true, but I can see why you'd think that. I worked for a reputable SP company in Oxfordshire, legal were all over everything we did. The Hoover debacle did wonders for our business, all of a sudden clients wanted protection from the scammers.
But ok I then went to one in London and some directors were sent to prison for fraud. So OP yes you have a point. It was a dodgy world.
I miss Fry's Electronics, but they were definitely a practitioner of "free after rebate" and other rebate-based discount schemes where they took your money up front and claimed that you would get some of it back from some third party sometime in the future.
In spite of the obviously scammy nature of such promotions, I still took the bait a few times, averaging probably a 50% rebate success rate - somewhat better than I would have predicted. At some point there was a web site where you could check your rebate status, which seemed to help a bit.
I did submit those rebates, and was paid back all of them. They weren't scams. You had to be very meticulous about cutting out the correct UPC bar codes and scanning and retaining copies of receipts etc. The hoops were elaborate, but if you jumped through them - you got your money back.
The trick with "under the cap" winnings, was to ship the lot with the grand prize, to a slow consumption area.
I grew up in a rural area, but one with a tourist season. The population almost tripled in tourist season, and tourists consume far more "on the run" consumables.
More than one local won the grand prize, months after a 6 month contest ended.
The cans/bottles, and promotional material did clearly stipulate when the contest ended.
By shipping the cans/bottles to an area of low consumption, a month before the end of promotion, it ensures it would be unlikely that the winner would find a bottle cap before end of promotion.
Don't what the problem was, I got my free holiday to Orlando out of it, on the day I wanted and from the airport I wanted... ;-)
The article missed out one important detail - the deal included very overpriced accommodation, which is how they were going to claw the cost of the flights back. But they failed to make booking the accommodation through the deal mandatory, so people took the flights and not the accommodation.
Yep and overpriced travel insurance too. It wasn't just the bureaucratic restrictions they were relying on. The plan was the travel agents would do high pressure upselling to claw back the cost but the public didn't bite in sufficient numbers.
> Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a promotion held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people.
From the article, 3 victims were PepsiCo workers and 2 were a teacher and a student that were caught in the blast of a pipe bomb thrown at a PepsiCo truck. How is the company to blame for the action of a mob of idiots and anarchists?
An early internet promotion that would have probably been more costly if they had the same advertising reach was online casino deposit bonuses. In the early 2000s it was popular for online casinos to offer bonuses on deposits used to play. Say 50% or 100% bonus up to $2000. The only catches were one bonus per household and you had to bet at least the full amount of the deposit and bonus before cashing out. There was no limit on the game to use it with or other hoops to jump through. So it was pretty easy nearly break even in black-jack for 30 minutes, cash out, and move onto the next.
Every single word of your post was great, correct, but meaningless at the time except for two words near the end.
Cash. Out.
Man, I went through all those hoops, spent weeks, scamming those systems, real money too, but mostly playing the game you outlined but when it came time to get that money suddenly that sites admins were in cayman. Then Bermuda. Then Sri Lanka and their English suddenly wasn’t too good!
Once I ended up with a perosnal cheque from one of their guys as I was bitching on the forum making them look bad.
Can’t believe a) I cashed it and it and b) it wasn’t a scam.
I actually got 600$ from an online casino like that. (2007 iirc)
I got free 50$ but had to wager 2k$ before cashing out.
Played some slot machine, run hot and had 600$ by the time the bonus cleared.
I took out cash from ATM a couple days later.
This and entry level books on legal contracts make a fantastic read on how things can go wrong very quickly for those who promise heaven and then some more.
This was recently covered in depth in "Now I Know" [0] - a random corner of Internet with quirky collection of articles. I have been a happy reader these past many weeks.
The U.S. Treasury used to run a promotion on the online sale of dollar coins to encourage the usage of them in circulation. They accepted credit cards for the online purchases and shipped the coins free of charge. People just bought them with credit cards that gave rebates, points, or miles, and then deposited the coins in banks to get back the cash.
I have heard of this before. I even met someone who claimed they they would do this with their high cash back cards and claimed to reap thousands in rewards with unlimited cash back. Even said they would open new cards to do this with they high dollar promo periods and high credit limits and would just do this while the promotion was active.
Claimed to have made thousands on it, maybe even 10s of thousands
I always wondered if your credit scorn would be all jacked because it would report this high to zero usage
> temporary impact on your credit score. Applying for multiple credit cards at once will reduce your score for a few months; if you will be applying for a mortgage, car loan, job, apartment, or other situation that requires a check of your credit, it is a good idea to stop all churning activity as far in advance as possible. Most conservative estimates recommend at least 2 years as "hard pulls" from credit card inquiries will fall off your credit report in 2 years.
> your homeowners insurance rate can be impacted by your churning activity, even though your credit score remains high. Your insurer regular does a soft pull on your credit, and they may increase your rate if there are a lot of new credit lines, even though your overall credit score and utilization may remain in good standing.
I did this while it lasted. Just enough to reach minimum spend tiers for credit card promotions, though (e.g. spend $5000 in the first 3 months and earn XX,000 miles). There were definitely people doing it on a much larger scale on forums like FatWallet (RIP).
And if you had good credit and lots of credit cards already, having one or two cards occasionally nearly maxed out didn’t really hurt your credit score much.
The wildest parts of those forum threads were the people whose coin shipments were lost or delivered to the wrong address. Intense panic after they realized they might have lost thousands of dollars in the process of chasing a tiny cash back or reward bonus.
It was also fascinating to watch it all break down in the end, as banks stopped accepting bulk deposits of the coins. A lot of panicked people trying to find some way to get their thousands of dollars of coins back into their checking accounts after every bank in town turned them away. IIRC, some credit card companies also stopped paying rewards on those purchases or closing accounts due to the obvious manufactured spending, making all of the risk and work pointless.
My friend and I actually did this! We bought a Hoover, got flights to New York - I flew out months and months later in summer 1993 - and the Hoover itself we gave to my parents, and it’s STILL there at my late parents’ place, working.
Sad thing was it was a last ditch attempt to save jobs at a few hoover factories in the UK. Redundancies followed and the last factories closed in 2002
I confess that I don't actually know why rebates went so far out of fashion. I assume companies figured out better ways to price discriminate and enough people got to the point of "what's a stamp?" that even many price sensitive people weren't reeled in by rebates.
A random piece of trivia is that most rebate forms went to Young America in Minnesota. A long ago company I worked for supplied them with a lot of their computing gear.
My mother used this to go on holiday (Greece if I recall, however I may be many thousands of miles off). We still have the very same Hoover, so for her it wasn't a bad deal.
Disastrous promotions notwithstanding, didn't Dyson eclipse Hoover by developing a greatly improved design (bagless/cyclonic, which has since become a popular standard design for vacuum cleaners?)
Yes, the modern dual cyclone bagless vacuum is Dyson's invention[1] and was subsequently adopted by the industry as a whole (including Hoover, Electrolux, etc..) Cyclonic separation had previously been used in central vacuum systems and canister vacuums but not in portable upright vacuums.
The design was so successful that Dyson became the most popular vacuum cleaner brand in the UK, and it remains so today.
It's sorta like this with many vc-backed companies. Operate at a loss to get market share in the hope that some customers can be billed later or raise prices.
Myself and a friend bought a hoover for the flights to the U.S.
I've no memory of the application process being difficult and we even returned the hoover to the store and swapped it for the equivalent in Sega mega drive games without any issues.
I actually went out to the US separately as part of a student work America summer visa and my friend and another person used the voucher to meet me in Orlando. This was definitely late 1992 so very sure the quote about no flights being honoured initially aren't accurate.
I knew a guy employed to work in the 'free flights' call center. He was a total sleaze ball. His job was literally "do and say anything not to give them flights..
This was a weirdly strong memory from my childhood.
The BBC’s consumer rights programme Watchdog, which my parents always watched, would cover it on an almost weekly basis.
It really was a staggeringly stupid thing to do. And it was weird to watch Groupon convince so many small businesses to do similarly ruinous promotions in the 2000s.
Maybe I'm the only one, and man would I love some way to confirm or deny this (given that Harold Ramis is dead, and was a primary writer, this isn't likely) but did anyone that happens to be an 80's movie nerd pick up on the name Spangler in the linked article?
The article says in 1908 James Murray Spangler invents and patents the first vacuum cleaner. In 1984 we get the movie "Ghostbusters" in which one of the main protagonists is Egon Spangler who invents a way to to trap ghosts (by "sucking" them into traps.)
132 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadOn the other hand, the Hoover example was based upon pure dishonesty. They made a claim, put in a bunch of rules to disqualify people, took steps to slant the rules in their favour, then hoped it would be enough to win the numbers game. Hope because they were relying upon assumptions that were very much out of their control.
"The math was concerning: On the sale of a £119 vacuum cleaner, Hoover made a profit of £30. The two free fights that came with it were worth at least £600. This meant that each customer who followed through with the promotion cost Hoover £570."
Most of us remember the period where almost everything in computer stores were "free after rebate." "Emachine 1997 model FREE AFTER REBATE", "Pack of 50 CDR FREE AFTER REBATE".
The rebate involved you filling out a form with the original proof of purchase, sending it off, and either never hearing from them again or having it denied. "Sorry, wrong receipt, send us the real one" but it was already gone.
Now, I assume anything with a rebate is fraud. The insight from this article is that we were right.
I still have several spindles of CD-Rs (and later DVD-Rs) that were free (or maybe $1) after rebate.
Sometimes they insist in paying in amazon vouchers or some other 'almost cash' currency.
They are very common on subscriptions.
Other things used as cash include gift cards, cigarettes, drugs, bikes, iDevices, baby formula, diapers, laundry detergent...
Although, generally speaking, Amazon and other general purpose large retailers (Walmart, Home Depot) have figured that out. When I get rewards points of some sort with an option to convert to various gift cards, the best deal is always with the specialty retailers but then you need to make a point of using the card for something you really want/need as opposed to just adding some dollars to your Amazon account.
I usually find out about these deals on https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ which is run by what seems like fantastic, non-scammy, people and its the only credit card blog that I know of that's independent. The rest shill for referrals.
I worked at a store that heavily promoted these things to get foot traffic. The only people with problems were the people lining up on Sunday meaning to fill a cart with shit they didn’t need - or even know what it was to get it for “free”.
I remember one guy, who punched me in the mouth, screaming that he bought a scam video card “it doesn’t even play tapes” for $14.95 and didn’t get his $20 rebate for whatever reason. I think that he didn’t include the UPC code or something. The medical bills after I threw him out the window, the arrest and fine were a lot more than $14.95.
I used the free cd offers all of the time to get CD-Rs… we’d make custom mix CDs for the folks in our dorm.
I assume from the story those are the angry fellows charges not our hero protagonist.
One can not punch a person and not expect retaliation, even if that person you perceive to be a social inferior to you doing retail work.
Funny you took the complete opposite way that the clerk got in trouble.
> Though already existing in Middle French, the word defenestrate ("out of the window") is believed to have first been used in English in reference to the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of a window of the Hradčany Castle and wrote an extensive apologia explaining their action.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague
But that article has no citations for that claim...
The prefix de- is used in Czech normally since forever and to this day (originally Latin though), the stem fenestra is Latin (not normally used in Czech), and the suffix -ace is Czech (Slavic origin).
BTW the quote you posted says the first usage in English language was in reference to the Czech text which actually coined it (thus the English text adopted it), not that it's English in origin.
It's only used in loan words. Like "depilace" is a normally used loanword in Czech, non-loan word variant would be "odchlupeni". But "dechlupeni" (using "de-" instead of "od-" + native Czech word) would be completely nonsensical.
Claiming that "defenestrace" is originally a Czech word seems absurd to me. It might have been "invented" in Czech lands, but clearly from the latin form.
The prefix de- is not used only in loanwords, you can construct new words with it just fine. It doesn't sound right in your example but that doesn't mean it's nonsense.
> The prefix de- is not used only in loanwords, you can construct new words with it just fine.
Listing some examples would strengthen your argument immensely.
> It doesn't sound right in your example but that doesn't mean it's nonsense.
To my native ear, it sounds nonsensical. I wouldn't be able to guess what it is supposed to mean.
It was the Czech person who first combined the Czech/Latin prefix, the Latin stem and the Czech/Slavic suffix in a decidedly Czech sentence.
> Listing some examples would strengthen your argument immensely.
You said one yourself. Nobody would say it because there's already a better way to say that, but everybody would understand the meaning and the grammar is fine.
> but everybody would understand the meaning and the grammar is fine.
No, I certainly wouldn't. It's nonsense.
Can you name a word formed like that which is present in some dictionary?
(I had the displeasure of studying Latin in school)
Note that all Latin speakers in that time period spoke Latin as their second (third...) language, and it was pretty common to see influence of other (mother) languages onto the used Latin. It wouldn't be surprising if e.g. a German native speaker (where such word concoctions are common place) coined such a Latin word.
Here ( https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=defatigatio&la=... ) is a dictionary entry citing defatigatio to a speech given by Cicero.
The best discussion of the original formation of the word I have been able to find was here: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/35905/did-a-...
The cops thought it was great. My boss not so much. The whole thing was absurd - an adult attacking a 19 year old over a few dollars.
Their business model was based on the assumption that a percentage of customers would forget to do this. Unfortunately, when hundreds or thousands of $ is on the line, people were very diligent! Unsurprisingly that company didn't last long.
Reminds me of Jessica Walter's character in Arrested Development: "It's a banana, Michael - how much could it cost? Ten dollars?"
https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla...
Assuming no one here went to jail this is essentially a legal way to run a ponzi scheme.
Rich people aren't idiots, I think the target customer for this thing is someone who's so price sensitive that they'll go to huge lengths to get a TV for free.
I got so much stuff I didn't need from them. I filled my entire dining table with stuff, and got my family to help me with an assembly line style UPC cutting and pasting operation.
I even scripted their website to auto-generate the rebate form.
The final batch never paid out, but I was able to file a credit card chargeback for most, but not all, of it.
I scripted that too. I had to print and fax around 400 pages of documentation to the credit card company. (Print directly to fax either didn't exist then, or at least I didn't have it.)
It's been how many years? And I still have stuff from them in my house, some in use, some just brand new in a box.
I was getting 1.5% cashback from the credit card I used, and everything was completely free.
Edit: cyberrebate.com [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberRebate
I believe he got paid every time or close to.
Haram
I've gotten all the rebates I've filled out. I just assume that enough people are sloppy or don't read instructions that it works out for the company
I also try to do any of those class action suits I qualify for. Those are a little more hit or miss but it's about the same time investment of a simple form, but usually those take a lot longer to get money. Got a check for 3 bucks for buying chips at some point in the past couple years, but it was really nice getting hundreds of dollars put into my bank account from Facebook a few months back after filing a claim years ago and forgetting about it.
But ok I then went to one in London and some directors were sent to prison for fraud. So OP yes you have a point. It was a dodgy world.
In spite of the obviously scammy nature of such promotions, I still took the bait a few times, averaging probably a 50% rebate success rate - somewhat better than I would have predicted. At some point there was a web site where you could check your rebate status, which seemed to help a bit.
I grew up in a rural area, but one with a tourist season. The population almost tripled in tourist season, and tourists consume far more "on the run" consumables.
More than one local won the grand prize, months after a 6 month contest ended.
I won a brand new car, 2 months past win date.
By shipping the cans/bottles to an area of low consumption, a month before the end of promotion, it ensures it would be unlikely that the winner would find a bottle cap before end of promotion.
The article missed out one important detail - the deal included very overpriced accommodation, which is how they were going to claw the cost of the flights back. But they failed to make booking the accommodation through the deal mandatory, so people took the flights and not the accommodation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3704669.stm
To be truly "worst", I'd say you'd have to feature in the textbooks of students of English contract law.
See, for example, Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company[1] which is a famous example used in every single textbook.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Number_Fever
> Pepsi Number Fever, also known as the 349 incident, was a promotion held by PepsiCo in the Philippines in 1992, which led to riots and the deaths of at least five people.
Somehow, the company and the brand still exist.
> About 22,000 people took legal action against PepsiCo; at least 689 civil suits and 5,200 criminal complaints for fraud and deception were filed.
Cash. Out.
Man, I went through all those hoops, spent weeks, scamming those systems, real money too, but mostly playing the game you outlined but when it came time to get that money suddenly that sites admins were in cayman. Then Bermuda. Then Sri Lanka and their English suddenly wasn’t too good!
Once I ended up with a perosnal cheque from one of their guys as I was bitching on the forum making them look bad.
Can’t believe a) I cashed it and it and b) it wasn’t a scam.
I got free 50$ but had to wager 2k$ before cashing out. Played some slot machine, run hot and had 600$ by the time the bonus cleared. I took out cash from ATM a couple days later.
https://simpleflying.com/american-airlines-aairpass/
[0] https://nowiknow.com/the-marketing-stunt-that-vacuumed-up-a-...
Claimed to have made thousands on it, maybe even 10s of thousands
I always wondered if your credit scorn would be all jacked because it would report this high to zero usage
I shall add this to my list of unverifiable FICO score rumors.
> your homeowners insurance rate can be impacted by your churning activity, even though your credit score remains high. Your insurer regular does a soft pull on your credit, and they may increase your rate if there are a lot of new credit lines, even though your overall credit score and utilization may remain in good standing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/wiki/index
And if you had good credit and lots of credit cards already, having one or two cards occasionally nearly maxed out didn’t really hurt your credit score much.
It was also fascinating to watch it all break down in the end, as banks stopped accepting bulk deposits of the coins. A lot of panicked people trying to find some way to get their thousands of dollars of coins back into their checking accounts after every bank in town turned them away. IIRC, some credit card companies also stopped paying rewards on those purchases or closing accounts due to the obvious manufactured spending, making all of the risk and work pointless.
Helluva deal for us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur)
A random piece of trivia is that most rebate forms went to Young America in Minnesota. A long ago company I worked for supplied them with a lot of their computing gear.
The design was so successful that Dyson became the most popular vacuum cleaner brand in the UK, and it remains so today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dyson
I've no memory of the application process being difficult and we even returned the hoover to the store and swapped it for the equivalent in Sega mega drive games without any issues.
I actually went out to the US separately as part of a student work America summer visa and my friend and another person used the voucher to meet me in Orlando. This was definitely late 1992 so very sure the quote about no flights being honoured initially aren't accurate.
The BBC’s consumer rights programme Watchdog, which my parents always watched, would cover it on an almost weekly basis.
It really was a staggeringly stupid thing to do. And it was weird to watch Groupon convince so many small businesses to do similarly ruinous promotions in the 2000s.
The article says in 1908 James Murray Spangler invents and patents the first vacuum cleaner. In 1984 we get the movie "Ghostbusters" in which one of the main protagonists is Egon Spangler who invents a way to to trap ghosts (by "sucking" them into traps.)
Spengler. Not Spangler.