you see them on everything now days "tell us how we did and win a gift card ect "
Anyone ever win of them or know anyone who has ?
My aunt knows a lot of the cashiers by sight and a few by name and sh e always gets told " fill one out people are winning big "
So I get to fill them out for hours and weve never won a damn thing but I cant convince her there a waste of time “but … we might get lucky …”
Not a CS survey but earlier this year I had an unusually pleasant experience shopping at a **T2 ** shop on the way home from work. That night I sent them an email praising the young guy that had served me and saying how pleasant I found shopping at their shop. They contacted me to thank me for the feedback, got my address and sent me a parcel of samples and a $30 gift voucher.
Not bad since I had no reason to expect anything as a reward.
My usual grocery store gives a $5 coupon for filling out their online survey. No contest; it’s a coupon for guaranteed $5 off on your purchases.
I’ve gotten it down to 4 minutes to complete their survey. And I can reuse each coupon for about a month before it expires, which is good for about 3 store visits for me. $15 for 4 minutes’ work is a decent hourly rate. And I get the same offer again on each later purchase to do it again.
I never have, and never will, do anything like that which promises an entry in a drawing. Absent hard evidence to the contrary, the payoff can safely be assumed to be negligible.
Moderator Action
Since this is informally polling for personal experiences, let’s move it to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Intermittent reinforcement. Best kind there is. (For the trainers, that is.)
You do realize that the “survey” is the least valuable part of your response to these things, right? Oh, they tally the answers and look at the totals, but the real prize is all the personal information you’ve given them, tied to the purchase. Much as product registration cards did for decades with checkbox “surveys” attached.
It’s up to you whether yet another probe into your personal information and yet more tracking of your activities is worth a lottery chance, or even $5.
Got a BOGO on a sausage, egg, Mcmuff.
That’s a benefit? 
Agreed in general, but there’s nothing they learn from the survey they don’t already know from my loyalty / discount card. When, where, what bought, and how paid for are already in their systems.
Me stating how well I liked the cashier or whether the store is easy to navigate or whether the dairy department is clean and well-stocked are not the keys to my family secrets.
When I worked at an RV dealership, they gave out “golden tickets” for a drawing for camping lounge chairs. It was a ruse to get your personal contact information. They not only never gave anything away, they didn’t even bother to put the tickets in the barrel. We were just supposed to copy the information on the ticket to our contact card file and throw it away. I refused to participate in what was a blatantly dishonest practice.
And no, I’ve never won anything by responding to a receipt request.
From you individually, perhaps. But have you ever updated the info on file from when you got the loyalty card? Mine still has a false address and my California phone number, six years later.
So it’s not a a carefully-managed, individually-tailored effort, but repeated trawling of sea greens and fish and proteins from the sea (of customers). All sorted out and indexed by a generation of computers that can handle big data (rendering the argument about, “Oh, there’s no way they can keep track of all those details on us” moot.)
I won a very nice insulated shopping bag from Trader Joe’s from their “Bring Your Own Bag” drawing. It’s just a ticket you write your phone number on and drop in a fishbowl. Very low tech, maybe logged but probably not tracked.
I don’t bother with receipt surveys, although if someone is truly helpful and goes above and beyond I’ll take note of their name and send a nice email to the store manager or corporate or both. I’ve never received a response but I hope it pays dividends in some way for the employee.
Back when I ate there regularly, Del Taco used to give you a free bean & cheese burrito for filling out a receipt survey. It was worth the 2 minutes it took, and I answered the demographic questions differently every time.
It worked for us. Made for a cheap date.
We got a $100 gas gift card once and a friend won a $1000 grocery card for a survey through a reciept. The bad news is she couldn’t claim hers because her son works for that company so she isn’t legally allowed to accept it. But it looks like they are legit - just really long odds of winning.
There have been, and are much more simplistic surveys and data-collection activities as well as the “greater” ones we’ve been discussing. Obviously if your local indy convenience store read in some marketing book that they should do a survey of their customers to help stock the right products, it’s likely to be that, and nothing else.
IOW, “back in the day” receipt surveys were new and simple and not yet exploited by the upper reaches of the consumer goods industry. As some may still be. Game on.
I should have combined this in the last post - of course stores do this kind of thing all the time, and it may have nothing to do with more advanced/nefarious types of data gathering. They got you to bring a bag, you put an ID slip in a jar, a lucky winner got a better shopping bag from it. Just another facet of simple marketing efforts.
My posts are about specific practices at a fairly high and widespread level, not every local store’s prize giveaway or most small merchants applying old marketing practices.
I get the gist, but what does “CS” stand for?
CS=“customer service”
My employer really does give out their ONE advertised prize… but they have 230 stores in 5 states with thousands of customers per week in each (and that’s a conservative number…). The odd that the ONE winner they pick will be you is very, very small. Very much like a lottery.
I’ve been their customer for 40 years (even if an employee for only 3) and never won the damn receipt lottery.
I won one of those rate the website surveys from a travel site in the United Kingdom. Even better, they wired the £150 to my account in the USA without an extra charge.
We (my employer) gives out hundreds of $5 gift cards a week from receipt survey winners. We also print out millions of these on receipts each week, but only tens of thousands actually fill them out. Not sure of the exact odds, but way, way better than most people seem to believe.
Now if more people believed the odds were better, more would participate and the odds would plunge, because I don’t think we would increase the number of winners.
Most of what we sell is “necessaries” so a $5 gift card (with no minimum purchase) has value to most customers, who tend to be in our stores about once a week on average. It’s not like getting a $5 gift card to an appliance store.
The whole process is managed for us by a third party marketing research outfit.