Sunday, May 10, 2009

KFC

AKA Kinda Fuckin' Cheap. So this evening we decided to use the coupons KFC put out online and get dinner on our way to the Grateful Dead concert in Inglewood. We went to the KFC in Sylmar, parked and went inside because we thought they might have trouble redeeming them in the drive thru. When we walked up to the counter with them, the girl at the register starts to hand us two other sheets of paper and tells us "we aren't accepting those printouts, you have to fill these out and mail them in and the'll mail you coupons". So Sean says "that's not what it said online when KFC offered them" and she told us that apparently a lot of people are making copies of the coupons and redeeming them so they aren't accepting them. Now, there's a whole lot wrong with this scenario, but we just ask for the manager. She comes out and tells us that corporate won't allow them to take the print outs, we have to get coupons by mailing something in. I point out that right on the print outs it says "coupon" and she reiterates the story about people making copies. Sean tells her "we printed these out just like it said to do, these aren't copies, you should be able to verify that by scanning the bar code, because each one that printed had a different number". She says there's nothing she can do and again said we'd have to mail it in. We told her we wouldn't be doing that, instead, Sean would be Twittering about it, we'd both be posting it on our Facebooks and I'd be adding it to a blog we have where we rate restaurants. I also mentioned how their competitor, El Pollo Loco, is accepting KFC coupons tomorrow, Mother's Day, when KFC wasn't accepting it themselves, and that it was pretty rediculous.
So that's what happened with KFC- they created a campaign that they clearly weren't ready to administer and now won't honor their committment to their customers because of their own shortsidedness. If they do not have a way of scanning the coupons, they shouldn't even have them print with a barcode and number. It seems their marketing dept must be pretty inept if they couldn't figure out how this would work before putting it into action and if it's not working correctly, they should just eat it, because it's their error, not the consumers. It also seems to me that the whole reasoning behind this offer was to get consumers to try their new grilled chicken and to compete more effectively with El Pollo Loco, but now I know we for sure won't be trying their new chicken and I encourage everyone reading this to use their coupons at EPL tomorrow and to not patronize KFC since it does not stand by it's promises.

KFC would get 0 Monkees if it was possible, but since it isn't, they earn 1 Monkee.

3 comments: