Took my mom to Redacted, CT , Boston Market yesterday: a good-sized line, but not out the door, they were out of chicken and mashed potatoes, but we were offered alternatives, mom got the turkey, I got the meatloaf, which was .. interesting.

The funny (and slightly embarrassing) part was standing at the register, the counter person rings us and asks for $2.6whatever, and my mom goes off on the poor person: "why are you charging us? You mean we have to PAY??"

I guesse '$1 = free' in most peoples minds (at least for a whole meal), but I think mom took that a bit too literally.

@Stephen Colon: Very practical. Coupon sites (for manufacturer coupons, used at supermarkets, etc) are very good with the unique barcode system. You are only allowed 1-2 prints per IP address, and you have even have the potential to be banned if you abuse it.

The system is excellent and I've had some very good supermarket deals out of them.

+1

I consider the food at Boston Market to be better than most fast food places. At least there you can see that it's real chicken with real bones and everything - nothing mechanically separated!

The chicken pieces we got were TEENY TINY, and we both agreed that if we had paid for the meal, we'd be pretty upset by it, but for a $1 meal, it was really pretty good.

Hey, KFC, this is how you handle a promotion.

How much business will this cost the franchisees? How many employees were sent home because there was no food to sell? This means money out of the employees pockets, probably the same employees that stayed late to help because of the rush of coupon customers, now for working past their shifts, they make less money than last week.

FAIL. I like the food at Boston Market, it is overpriced to say the least, the prices are higher, the chicken is smaller, and the cornbread is half the size that it once was. We usually go there just to satisfy my partner's cravings, but I doubt that we will be back any time soon.

Simply, yes. If you make it available to a certain part of the internet in printable form, you are basically making it available to everyone. Go traditional with mailing lists? Just send them in standard mail. I am sure the USPS would love the little extra business and you would hit your target audience. All you have to do is give out instructions not to take copies.

Chicken for everyone as much as you want!!!

@kcvaliant:

QuikTrip does/did this with the free coupons from their survey program. The coupons had UUIDs printed on them and had to be scanned in to the register.

I tried to use one and it wouldn't scan, so they refused it. Went home and printed another copy (that did scan), problem solved.

BTW, I am not hearing of ANY cases where customers were being turned away without their $1 meal. Boston Market substituted the higher priced meals - turkey, meatloaf, brisket at the same price when they ran out of chicken... and they held out the promotion for a full week and their franchises actually honored the offer. Kudos on a well run promotion, Boston Market!

It wasn't good, but it was ..free.

Perhaps I'll take mom out tomorrow for a $1 chicken meal.

It is inexcuseable that ANY marketing person at a chain restaurant would launch a promotion like this and be so stupid as to not understand that coupons go viral and fanchise locations must have enough food on hand to handle MASSIVE redeption of any offer like this.

They saw the nightmare KFC went through and made the same mistake?

My opinion. Whole marketing department at Boston Market... FIRED.

Of course this is also the companies fault for allowing it or wording it where anyone could use it.. Should have tied it to the peoples email addresses on the list and once it was used and typed in the computer at the store it could never be used again..

They could not have one without the other. The $1 meal is just the value meal that has a quarter dark, one side, and a cornbread, from what I can tell. Since the chicken is cooked whole in a rotisserie and then cut up, they could have some white meat left for a while with no quarter darks, but generally it wont last long.

I'm so glad they never did anything like this when I worked there. I'd be gladder if they'd bring back my tortilla soup cause that was my addiction when I worked there.

Would any of you care to explain why you do this? Don't you think this is why these promotions crash and burn? If you had a restaurant, wouldn't you be angry if people did this? Do you know what you're doing is not right or do you think it's okay?

@cmdrsass: I make my own Boston Markets at home.

@Trai_Dep: Ingenius. I applaud your tenacity.

@JeniferF:

Damn right

The idea is the publicity from the free giveaway will encourage more customers to come in the door, as well as convince some of those who scored the freebies to return (based on the assumption they liked the food).

@tbax929 is rooting for a Phillies repeat: EXACTLY.

@Laura Northrup:
@tbax929 is rooting for a Phillies repeat:
Teases.

You couldn't PAY me to eat @ Boston Market here... GROSS.

Oh, if only there were a closer Boston Market...

@JulesNoctambule: The cat looks like if he could talk, he would say:

"Take a picture, I'll claw your nuts off you f*cking a-hole."

I used this coupon twice with some of my office mates at the Arlington Virginia location. It seemed like they were really prepared (every oven was cooking chicken and they had an assembly line thing going) and the whole thing went smoothly. I left thinking "this is how an awesome promotion should be run". Sucks that they are running out of chicken now. Maybe they should have shortened the promotion time frame?

I'm generally not a corporate guy, but are companies that have giveaways now supposed to anticipate that websites are going to spread their coupons to a greater audience than usual and there is going to be a rush on their restaurants/stores? It would seem to me that companies would probably just stop the giveaways altogether rather than run out of product in a rush of people looking for an almost free meal.