Delight @ Book paradise

We conducted a book review competition as a part of the HR Department's initiative at Alliance Business School last year. I was conducting the event with Lovely and we also took part and won the second prize. There were some coupons to be redeemed at Book Paradise. The glitch is that these coupons were delivered after 6 months and the last date for the redemption was in September 2008. So I was doubtful if they would accept them any more. The other day I went to the store and to my great surprise they accepted them. The owner was an 75 year old man and smiled and said it is OK and called a sales executive to help me hunt for the books. I picked up some on fiction.

What made me happy was that the shop owner made no fuss about it and the coupons were passed. Will I return, Definetely. Its at the resonance level now.

McD's SMS campaign

Last weekend we went to McD’s. Once the bill was paid we got a coupon announcing the cash back offer. All you had to do was to SMS the number given in the coupon to 5888 and you could stand a chance to win some cash back (ranging from 500 - 500000). In miniscule font it was mentioned that the SMS would be charged Rs.3. The entire crowd was standing there and texting right at the counter unmindful of the fact that their burgers and French fries were getting cold. I didn’t but my friend did and as expected he didn’t win. What a strategy to make extra bucks by McD’s.

See this logic.

The no. of footfalls in an hour ranges from 100 to 500. Let’s take the average of 300 per hour at 10 hours per day. That makes it 3000 customers and lets say 80% SMS for the offer. That is 2400 customers * 3 Rs = 7200/- If 2 rupees are paid to McD’s per SMS sent, then the earning per day still is 4800 while they give away Rs. 5000.

Now this is a worst case scenario. The footfalls on weekends are more as we saw this time. The executive said they could raise up to 800 bills just before the movie starts and considering there are 5 theatres and 3 shows on the weekend the no. of bills rise to 2000 – 4000 bills on a weekend converting to about 15K earned in a day while they still give away 5000 in gifts.

And some stats now. Assuming that you SMS, the probability of you winning the offer is about 0.002 - 0.0033. So do you still wanna SMS?