Woolworths has apologised to thousands of customers after mistakenly telling about 79,000 people they had won a competition.
The email for the Big Night In prize was meant to be sent to about 1000 winning customers.
Instead, 79,000 extra so-called winners were sent the same email - awarding them 4000 points towards the supermarket’s Everyday Rewards card system, which would equal $30 worth of groceries.
Stingy bastards.
They’d likely get more than 79000 × $30 of marketing ‘captial’ for just saying “oops, our mistake, but your benefit” and honouring it.
And chalk it up to not training your marketing team on how to use excel.
I was thinking about this. And under the rule of “if doesn’t matter what they are saying about you as long as they’re talking about you”, perhaps the marketing power is higher to deny it and make front page? It wouldn’t have been as big of a big news story if they had just paid it.
There is such a thing as bad publicity.
The only people that think otherwise are marketers who get paid their consulting fees regardless and millionaire executives that have no idea what the average person thinks because they’ve never been one and believe those consultants at face value.
Well I guess they have to decide what that bad publicity is worth.
$30*1,000 = $30,000 planned to give away.
They accidentally emailed an extra 79,000 people, so paying out would cost $2,370,000 (on top of the $30k already budgeted).
It’s a pretty significant difference so I can imagine they got together a committee and decided paying out wasn’t worth it.
They’re prepared to pay up $400m to rebrand countdown supermarkets to Woolworths. They’re not strapped for cash ;-)
They should be legally required to pay out.
Not sure about a legal requirement for a clear human error type mistake.
That being said… The prize was the point equivalent of $30 of groceries. They should just acknowledge the issue, and say that they’re letting people keep the points anyway. Just shift it to being an unexpected $2.3M advertising campaign. I’m sure they’d get more publicity out of that than actually spending the money on traditional advertising nowadays.
There’s nothing wrong with mistakes having consequences, especially ones as cheap as $2.3MM.
Yeah, some of us could get a small loan for about half of that to help cover it!
It was a corporation, not a person.
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Bold of you to assume this isn’t just a huge CSV loaded into Excel.
Wow… that’s amazing! I thought Woolworths had collapsed in the 80s!
I don’t think this Woolworths is related to the American Woolworth’s. They seem to have different histories. This is an Australian company that is one of the duopoly of supermarkets in NZ.
Originally it was literally a spoof of the US Woolworth’s called Walworth’s, then they realised under Aus law they could just use the original name
That’s why In-N-Out does pop-ups in Aus for one day every few years, to protect their trademark. And also relates to why Hungry Jack’s is just a Burger King franchise
No it wasn’t.
Although you do make a compelling argument, I found a source that supports that they were originally registered under the name Wallworths. To be fair, it looks like they changed the name to Woolworths before their first store opened, so the general public would never have known them as Wallworths.
