Free Pizza Tomorrow

So first, he's giving away 2,000,000 free pizzas via a NFL promotion, and now via a MLB promotion you can get 50% off his pizzas (from 12/21-28).

Tell me again how it's INSURANCE that is making the cost of Papa John pizzas going up $0.11-$0.14 in 2013?

Maybe stop giving away your damn product chucklehead.

Also, I would hope he's not stiffing his franchisees with the cost for these free and discounted pizzas under the guise of 'group marketing efforts'.

This Job Creator is one funny m'fer.....said no one ever.

Yes, I know he's since backed off his initial comments but he never denied that he said he'd raise prices.  I don't eat his stuff anyway.

Look in the mirror, will you, you idiots??

This is the thing that gets me about the political rhetoric each and every day and the extremes to which it's gone:

A well-known 'right winger' posted this about Benghazi "Who in the H do these tyrants think they are? Manufacturing a story about a scapegoat video then threatening to criminalize speech?"

It just strikes me funny in that a very valid response should be "the same type of tyrants who manufactured a story about WMD to start a war and who created Homeland Security which opened up the door for our own government to listen in on each and every conversation we have each day without just cause"

Both sides are wrong but neither see it and are only driven by their own extreme ideologies. Somewhere in the middle has to be the majority of us, no? I'm finding it hard each and every day to NOT believe that the true majority lies in the heart of the bell curve but just keeps getting ignored in favor of extreme talking points trying to drive agenda.

(W)horseshoe to the Head

When Jim Irsay says that Peyton Manning should "keep it (his comments) in the family", he does remember that it's a family that moved a football team under darkness of night out of the City of Baltimore, right?

His comments specifically were, "The horseshoe always comes first, and I think one thing he's always known, because he's been around it so long, is that, you know, you keep it in the family. If you've got a problem you talk to each other, it's not about campaigning or anything like that."

Jim, look, I know it was your Father but it was YOUR family who screwed over loyal fans in one of the most fantastic cities of the world.  Your family isn't as pristine and clean as you'd like it to be bub.

Peace, out!

Has the banking industry learned?

Likely not, but I was presently surprised at the outcome of two calls to credit card companies yesterday.

In one case we were closing out a card we've had for many years, with a high credit limit, but one that carried a $60/year service fee.  We were prepared to be begged, beaten and fought the whole way but instead, the customer service rep gave us a solution to a problem we mentioned, gave it one try to keep us on and then listened to the customer and immediately closed the account.

In the other case, in a response to an email that offered 12 months interest free if making a purchase by May 31st, we made a large purchase.  2 months into the deal we received interest charges on the most recent statement.  Customer service rep looked at, said it made sense and immediately filed an internal claim to get things fixed.  Even when I offered to send the proof, she said that it likely wasn't needed and that this has happened before.  The only issue was that it could take up to 10 business days for the solution but yet, there was no arguing or repeating the "obvious" problem that happened (which is that the vendor billed our card each time they shipped part of the order versus billing it all when we made the purchase).

Maybe I'm punchy tired, but for a moment I thought that the Financial Industry is actually being thankful to the public for bailing them out and treating people they've extended credit to as human beings.

Who knows, we can only hope.

Half-off overload - let's not kill a good thing please

No one can say that Groupon hasn't been a wildly successful venture and as a Chicago-based company I'm super happy for them and it sheds more light on some of the great, creative thinking that comes out of our region.

Of course, where there's huge success follows all the copycats and knock-offs.

One could argue that Groupon already was a knock-off from restaurant.com or from a lot of local, extremely local radio stations who used to run the 50-70% off gift certificate programs on Saturday mornings and that would be fair.  In fact, anyone who has bought an Entertainment book in the last 20+ years knows that deals can be found everywhere.

But nothing has taken a foothold more quickly than Groupon.  Beyond the billions of dollars being thrown at them from Google and others, they probably get a VC offer once a week that could be enough money to feed Haiti for 5 years or longer.

They've definitely had their missteps and this past week at SXSW one of their clients (Uber) decided to air some of those grievances on a panel.  Interestingly enough there were several Groupon staffers in the audience who took exception to this and addressed some of the issues, in fact, admitting that they've likely grown faster than their operations can handle.

However the latest issues I've noticed aren't with Groupon itself.  It's with the hyper-aggressive sales forces that Groupon, Living Social, Yelp, OpenTable and soon to be Facebook, etc. have been hiring.  They are out in huge numbers as commissioned sales folks tend to be.  As admitted at the SXSW panel, in fact, the sales model and volumes are growing faster than they can grow the operations side which is causing major issues.

My biggest fear though is that there are businesses who really like this idea and are jumping on board left and right.  Good for consumers, however, when these businesses sign deals with ALL of the services as a user/consumer/target I'm getting multiple deals, frequently within a two day period for the same store/restaurant/service.  From a marketing plan stance, this isn't very smart and I'm realizing that the "sellers" aren't figuring this out and trying to control it.  It's a runaway boulder running down the hill.

Not only are the deals coming in successive days, they frequently aren't the same, most likely driven by the revenue share/service fee model for each company.  Again, as an end user this is sending a mixed message to me.  So I can get $50 of food for $25 today, but tomorrow I can only get $30 for $15??  Sure, EITHER option is nice during this economy but it starts cheapening the offer and muddying the message that the "seller" likely wants to its patrons both existing and new.

So what set me off on this rant?  Two specific events:

• The fact that I got an offer for Botox treatments (same vendor) from Groupon and Living Social a day apart.  I guess at almost 45, I'm becoming the target market but it irritated me enough and,
• One of our favorite restaurants, Claddagh having multiple different deals across THREE of these sites within 4 days.  Upon cashing one of these in the waiter humorously said "Well, I see we have a Groupon deal here".  I can't imagine the glut of these that the staffs are seeing.  Again, it's a good thing as it drives business but it could also be a bad thing for staff who might get screwed on tips by those cheap-asses out there.

So where does this leave us?  I'm not sure but given that the various services will not work together like an online publisher to space out the offers across the various networks (they are in competition and won't play nice) I think it's really important for businesses drinking the Kool-Aid to manage their own marketing plans AS WELL AS trying out only ONE of the services first to see the revenue/operating profit impact on their business.

Deep discounts are great for foot traffic but with 2000 50% off coupons sold on Groupon and 1500 40% off on Living Social and so on, any decent level of conversion could hit a business hard in the pocketbook until the true level of repeat triers can be validated.  Meaning, the Groupon got them in the door the first time, do they come back without a Groupon the next time OR were all the Groupons already bought by existing customers?  If you cannabilize your existing revenue stream without a fairly decent uptick in NEW revenue it's ultimately a bad deal.  See Navy Pier issue from December 2010.

Usually it's buyer beware, but this time around I truly feel it's seller beware!

Everyone's gettin' paid but US!!

So I thought it a little odd that I got an email from ComEd the other day.  Sure, they have my email address as a customer but frankly they don't send out much email.

Imagine my shock when I read it and they were actually offering up help!!

Hey, that's mighty white of them especially at a time in our economy when most people haven't had a raise in two years and HELL a lot of people don't even have jobs.  I mean, some big corporation (Exelon) who has made profit over the last two years, looking to help us little folks out to ensure that instead of having to eat gruel, we can spend a little more to get those Fruit Loops we've wanted (well, new ones that weren't part of the recall, right?)

Here's a screenshot of their offer (click on it to make bigger):

The ComEd worker looks like a proctologist just waiting to ram that thing up your backside, eh?

Yep, we're seeing higher bills due to higher electricity usage to keep our homes cool.

Wait. What?  We're also seeing higher bills thanks to an increase in rates back in July, right?

So on top of their nifty stat that customers are using 12% more electricity than last year due to the massive heat waves, we're doing so at an 11% increase in rate.  To top that off, back at the end of June they also asked for an increase for 2011 of 7%

As my Junior High Spanish Teacher, Miss Asa used to say "Awww pobrecito".  You're being so generous to us while having your way...

Yeah, thanks, but no thanks

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