Megan and I went shopping this past Saturday to get some things that we needed for ourselves and for our upcoming trip to Hawaii. Megan gets a lot of coupons and offers from JC Penney so we decided that we’d head there first and check out their sale and see if there were some things we liked.
As I normally do, I checked in on Foursquare. I was surprised to see a check-in special from the store for $10 off a $50 purchase. I wanted to try it out at the register so I kept the screen up on my phone waiting for checkout.
After browsing and picking out items for a while we got to the register. I showed the cashier the phone with the screen and her face went blank. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the “WTF did you show me?” look. Her verbal response was “usually mobile coupons have barcodes”. Argh.
I noticed there was a code of some sort on the deal and gave the cashier the code. Nothing happened. It was at that point I noticed a tiny bit.ly link in the text on the deal (a non-custom one). I tried to click on it… nada, copy the text… nada. Once I had it memorized to enter in my phone’s browser it was then that I noticed that my phone actually had no reception.
Gave up at that point. Went out to the car and tweeted about it. Yesterday I got a reply from the official JC Penney twitter account that I should email them about the situation.
I did.
They replied today with an update that not only had they contacted the store manager to provide information so that cashiers could be trained for foursquare specials. They also shared my email with their mobile marketing and digital media teams for review.
They also asked for my mailing address so that they could send me a $25.00 merchandise certificate. The fact that the foursquare deal is $10 off a $50 purchase means I win!
Here’s the deal with this. I didn’t really expect a response (one of the reasons I didn’t use their handle in my original tweet). Also, I never actually expected to get anything out of this. Knowing that someone was listening and that they passed my email on was good enough for me… but 25 bucks is 25 bucks.
So, thank you to whomever from the JC Penney CS team for listening.