It seems everyone wants to know what I think - Food Lion, Cracker Barrel, Best Buy, Wal Mart - they all give you a website and an identifying code so you can offer your opinions on your most recent customer experience (or whatever other verbiage is used.) The enticement was an entry into a drawing for a gift card or a free meal or some other fabulous prize.
I used to fill those things out in very careful and thoughtful detail. I never won anything. I never knew anyone who ever won anything. Surely it’s not a scam???
So, have you ever won or known someone who has won under similar circumstances? And I’m not counting the “free” vacations you “win” by agreeing to sit thru a time-share spiel. My thread, my rules.
I have not, and have not known anyone to ever win something that way. I have gotten a thank you coupon here or there, however (I do not consider that a “prize”).
My understanding is that these schemes are created to harvest your contact information - name, email, phone #, etc. - so that info can be used to contact you with “special offers”, or sold to someone else for the same purposes. For that reaon, I never play.
I never fill out the ones that say you can win a prize, but I do fill out the ones that give you a code to put on the survey/receipt and then it can be used as a coupon the next time you go to that particular establishment.
The store chain I grocery shop at most often has a prize for filling out the survey information, and I’ve never won, nor has anyone I’ve heard of won.
But I still do it because they do have another incentive. The chain offers 10cents per gallon off on gasoline for every 100 “gas points” you earn, and each time you fill out the survey(limit once every seven days), you get 50 points. So if, in a month, you fill it out four times you can get 20 cents per gallon off on your next purchase of gas.
Olive Garden used to give $3 off your next visit if you went online and filled out the questionnaire. Did that better than half-a-dozen times. They don’t any more.
Yanno, this sounds like the kind of story perfect for some “Consumer Watchdog” segment on a local news station. I may just submit a suggestion. Who knows - if there’s ever a slow news day, someone may look into it.
If this qualifies, I did fill out a bank satisfaction survey embedded in a news article about a particular bank about two years ago. Imagine my surprise when I won a $500 Visa gift card! I almost didn’t claim it because I thought the calls and emails I was getting were spam. But it was legit.
Yes indeed! It was a marketing firm out of Toledo, Ohio, but I can’t recall the name. The survey was in a news story about the takeover of Citizens Bank (my bank at the time) by FirstMerit and IIRC was gauging people’s opinions about that. So it wasn’t really a direct survey like the type you find on receipts like you describe in your OP but I thought I’d throw it in anyhow.
McDonald’s has a survey where you answer it and you get BOGOF quarter-pounders/Egg McMuffins.
This is on every receipt, regardless of the $ amount. They don’t check for email addresses or anything, so it’s literally a perpetual BOGOF coupon. Get a $1 soda, fill out the survey, get a BOGOF quarter pounder, use the BOGOF quarter pounder receipt to fill out another survey, get another BOGOF quarter pounder, repeat until your sick of the damned things or switch to Egg McMuffins.
Del Taco has an offer on their receipts that gives you $1 off your next purchase or a free bean & cheese burrito if you fill out a quick survey. I do those all the time. It adds up. I’ve also won a $50 credit from Bevmo for taking one of their surveys.
Not the spamming industry - the marketing industry. I’d draw a distinction in that spammers tend to be no-name mercenaries at best, while the ‘surveys’ you fill out for Home Depot, Wal*Mart, Target etc. are going to utterly respectable 12th-floor big data banks.
Tear the survey off the receipt and hand it back. Better yet, hand it to the store manager.
“I don’t care if they monitor all my activity as long as I get really good online coupons for it!” - any of a dozen editorial cartoons in the last year.
It’s generally just an information gathering device. At the RV dealership I worked at, we used to have customers fill out a “Golden Ticket” for a chance to win a recliner camp chair. It was totally, cynically bullshit, without even a pretense of actually having a drawing for the chair. It was purely for the purpose of getting contact information for potential sales.
I fill out the survey from my grocery store, but not primarily for the prize potential (and no, I’ve never won. 'Twould be nice!) But when I have an exceptionally good experience, I try to make note of names so that I can give credit where it’s due. Same for bad service.
It seems to help. One of the employees mentioned recently that he had gotten a small bonus and expanded hours thanks to customer feedback. Meanwhile, another employee, who seemed unable to operate the register nor bag groceries well nor interact with customers seems to be gone. (And don’t misunderstand me, please. I’m extremely forgiving of rookie errors. But if you make those errors repeatedly, and never bother to even apologize for being slow, or quit making that mouth clicky rhythmic noise while bagging groceries, or interrupt your conversation with another employee while helping a customer? You don’t need to work with the public, dude!)
