Subway Sandwiches has made The List of Companies I Really Hate. Surprisingly, they haven’t made my list because of any sort of food poisoning incident, lousy food or horrible franchise practices.
They made my list because of their recently finished (though still advertised) “Fresh Resolutions” sweepstakes.
A sweepstakes sounds like a fun way to pull people into your store and offer them free prizes, but the process for playing this sweepstakes was so monstrous that it only served to really tick me off.
It all started when I was driving home and decided that I wanted something different for dinner, so I drove into my local Subway Sandwhich shop, picked up a sub and was given two free game cards. It looked simple enough, so after eating my mediocre sandwich I sat down and scratched off the two areas of the gamecard. I scratched off the larger area first and found… well, I’m not sure. It’s a drawing of an airplane with the words “Spend Time with Family & Friends” above it. This is my “Resolution” and, as far as I can tell, has no bearing on anything. Anywhere. Maybe it’s supposed to be the type of prize I might win or maybe it’s a subtle way for Subway to tell me I should host a birthday party at one of their shops. I’m not sure.
The smaller circle contained my “Game Code” and it was my first real point of frustration. The string of letters and numbers are fairly small, fairly blurry and were covered with grey smudge. I took the ticket to four different people before we were able to fully decipher all the numbers and letters. I’ll give Subway props for one thing: they actually put a slash through the zero, so that I knew it was a zero and not a letter “O.”
So I have my gamecard and I realize that I have no idea if I won or not. I needed to log on to subwayfreshresolutions.com to find out for sure. First, that’s a crappy URL to have to type in. It’s long and convoluted and kind of silly. I didn’t even bother. I went to subway.com and poked around until I found the link. Why not do the same on your gamecard? You want people to see more of your Subway site anyway.
After getting there I thought I could enter my code and collect my prize. Nope, no such luck. Here’s where things just got stupid. First I had to help Subway build up their database of client information by entering my name, address, email address and date of birth. And, curiously, they used the asterisk next to the optional fields, rather than next to the required fields as it is usually done.
Okay, again, I don’t really like the idea of entering all of this stuff just to find out if I won or not. Do you have to submit to a blood test before seeing the winning lottery numbers? It didn’t stop there, though. Apparently I had to create full user account complete with a password before I could get to the prize portion. I would then likely have to remember this password just in case, God forbid, I wanted to return to this site and enter another hard-to-read game card. This was a lot work just to see if I’d won some sort of unknown prize.
At this point I began to question if I should bother going any farther. I wasn’t sure if I was doing all this for the chance to win a lousy cup of soda and a bag of chips or my own private Leer jet.
I finally enter my entry code and then I notice another field I have to enter… a security code. Now I’ve already entered a ton of personal information, created a password and entered a code from a sweepstakes card I picked up in the store after buying a sandwich made of ingredients which definitely redefined “fresh” in a questionable way. At this point I am muttering out loud exactly the question I’m seeing on the screen: “Why do I have to enter this code?” There was some forced reason about security and making sure I was a real human. At this point I simply didn’t care anymore.
I was finally done. There were no more fields. There was now only one Submit button standing between me and my potential prize. I hold my breath, click the button and…
…a Flash animation begins to load, which is never a good thing. Sure enough, on the screen is a giant hand with a coin and a grey patch. I have to use my mouse to scratch off a virtual prize card.
All these steps just so I can use a $1000 computer, twenty minutes of my time and countless amounts of energy and broadband resources to do “virtually” what I could have just done on the 1/20th of a cent crappy sweepstakes card and a fingernail.
It’s enough to make Jared binge on a Big Mac and fries.
All of this, and I still didn’t win.
The final proof that Subway truly hates its customers presented itself a minute later. I tried my other sweeptstakes card and got the following message:
“We’re sorry. Only one entry permitted per day.”
I sobbed quietly to myself.
2 Responses to “Subway’s Substandard Sweepstakes”
-
thordora says:
I hate Subway, but mostly because they make me physically sick for some reason. I never do any kind of contest that requires online effort in conjunction with a game piece. It annoys me to no end, and I refuse to support it.
March 6th, 2006 at 3:22 pm -
sakr says:
omg the same exact thing happened to me, i was soo pissed that now whenever a company wants me to enter a code i dont!