Thursday, February 2, 2012

Is Jewel Osco guilty of wasting natural resources like TREES?

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Jewel Osco's "Wish Big Win Big Holiday Giveaway" was less about "winning" and more about wasting. They should have called it the "Waste Big Holiday not-Giveaway." Wish as in I WISH I never played the stupid game!

Companies use these gimmicks to attract customers knowing that good, innocent and morale people like me tend to be suckered into stupid waste-of-time games like the "Wish Big, Win Big" giveaway they sponsored that just ended Feb. 1. (You have until Feb. 15 to turn in winning prize boards -- right!

The point of these giveaway contests is to make the customer feel good and give them a pleasant experience and even give them little coupons so the customer will return to the store.

But I have to say the experience was so ugly and disappointing that I decided that I am going to try to avoid going to Jewel from now and and use other grocery stores from now on. That's how upset I am with this scam giveaway "game."

It's not a game, really. It was a scam. Yes, a few people won but when the odds are so outrageously stacked against the public, all Jewel did was waste a lot of trees. All the paper I threw away -- not even recycling will accept them -- must have accounted for about a million trees that were destroyed just so Jewel can sucker more customers into a false sense of enjoyment. It wasn't enjoyable, Miss Jewel. It was excruciatingly painful in fact to come home with a pocket full of green tri-folded tabs that were difficult to open and left bits and pieces of paper dust everywhere on my desk.

I ended up with a lot of worthless coupons, too, for junk I would never buy. There wasn't a coupon that I thought, wow, I hope I get this coupon again to save a measly 25 cents on my next purchase. They were all things I wouldn't buy.

I figure Jewel paid some big consultants the millions to come up with this trickery, money that should have been more easily won by players. The trickery was simple: They created a "game" that pushed crappy products and gave the player very little odds of even winning a measly $2.

Yes, I am going to associate the word "measly" from now in when I think of Jewel because of this game. Measly. (I had to look the word up to double check the spelling it is so rarely used but will now become my adjective to describe Jewel. Measly. Measly. Measly!)

The "game" wasn't a game at all. It was torture. The "Win Big" Jewel game was to customers what water boarding is to alleged terrorists. Except in this case, the customers were treated more badly.

Had I won the top prize of $250,000, maybe I'd be writing a different story. But I wonder how many customers actually won the big prizes?

And Jewel has a "drawing" for schlubs who played the game and won nothing -- they can turn in the game boards if they have 1 and 2 collected which everyone does. That's about 10 million entries that will be submitted.

Just what I need, more misery.

In every game, there are certain numbers missing. Maybe they make 2 of them in the entire country.

Here's the break down of the numbers that most people who lost are missing:

For the big prizes, they made sure that people would NOT get two of the required number tickets on their game card, just in case you got one of the rare numbers, you would still have to get. Here are the "rare" ones. 

04 and 05; 08 and 10; 12 and 15; 18 and 19; 22 and 26; 27 and 31; 33 and 35; 39 and 41.

Then there were the worthless stupid prizes just to keep the schlubs happy.

Those harder to get numbers were 44; 46; 50; 54; 59; 62; 68; 73; 76; 79; and 83.

For example, if you had 04 and 05, you would have won $250,000 (collecting SJ 01-06).

In the lower prize area, if you got 44 you would have completed the numbers needed 42 through 45, you would have won "$1,000.

I worked at Jewel when I was a kid in Chicago on Stony Island Avenue where Muhammed Ali (Casius Clay) would come and have me carry his bags out to his Lincoln Mark I car -- I was the darkest kid working there in the 1960s. And I worked at the Dominicks on 87th and Cicero in Oak Lawn when I got in to high school and I CAN SAY FOR A FACT THEY TREATED ME BETTER ... calm down, Ray. Calm down.

Breath. Breath. Breath!

-- Ray Hanania
www.hanania.com

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