Retail

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Fast Food $1 Burgers: Where’s the Beef?

The big three hamburger chains are battling for your buck by offering double cheeseburgers for only 99 cents or a dollar. The ads for these burgers make them look so large and enticing, but the reality is starkly different.

Here are pictures of the promised burgers followed by what MrConsumer was actually served.

Burger King double cheeseburger:

McDonald’s McDouble (ordered without the one piece of cheese):

Wendy’s Double Stack (ordered without the one piece of cheese):

All the burgers that were delivered looked like miniature sandwiches for children. None was really overflowing with meat as the photographs depicted, but the Wendy’s burger came the closest. It appears that fast food restaurants are taking an unreasonable amount of liberty in depicting the size of their burgers.

So how much beef is really in each of these sandwiches? Surprisingly, you can’t find out on the fast food restaurants’ websites except for Burger King, nor is it even listed in their nutritional information.

The PR or customer service folks at the three companies provided the hidden information.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The ugliest burger delivered — the one from Burger King — turned out to have the most beef, and frankly was the tastiest by far.

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The Case of the Disappearing Charity Donation

Those who watched the Apprentice a week ago Sunday saw a competition to promote the sale of Symantec’s Norton 360 computer protection software that is packaged along with Lifelock’s identity fraud protection service for $79.99. The commercial that immediately followed the selection of the winner promised to give $10 of each sale to a particular charity.

What probably went unnoticed by most people was a fine print disclaimer that flashed on the screen momentarily, limiting the donation.

*Mouse Print:

“up to $25,000”

While certainly any donation to a charity is a kind gesture by these companies, and $10 is a good percentage of the selling price, the cap on the donation really means that only the first 2500 orders will trigger it. If your company had in essence a two hour commercial for a product on national TV, wouldn’t you expect that tens of thousands of orders would be placed? If you then ran a commercial the following week on the Apprentice (last night) and said the charitable donation offer was being continued, wouldn’t you expect even more people to sign up? And wouldn’t you expect some goodly percentage of people watching either week might erroneously believe that they were helping a charity when in fact they may not have been?

To add insult to injury, if someone visits the Apprentice website at NBC.com, to find out about the offer, they would have seen the ad above. When clicking it, the user is taken to this descriptive page:

In neither place is there any mention of a $10 donation. In fact, in order for there to be a $10 donation, one of two promo codes have to be filled in on the order form (and they are not mentioned at all on the NBC site).

*MOUSE PRINT:

To make matters worse, a promo code that does not trigger the charitable donation is already filled in on the ordering page.

*MOUSE PRINT:

To their credit, both Lifelock and Symantec mention the charitable donation limit of $25,000 on their websites (albeit in small type), and pre-fill-in the proper code on their ordering forms. Mouse Print* wrote to NBC and Symantec to point out the problem, but no explanation or fix has yet been made.

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Sears Makes Good Despite the Fine Print (Part 2)

When last we left this saga, MrConsumer had ordered a Sears gas range based on a picture on their website. The stove that was delivered, however, was not like the picture in several respects, including coming with glossy instead of matte finish grates. Executives at Sears, once contacted, bent over backwards to right the situation by agreeing to replace the stove with the pictured model at no extra cost.

For a period of five days, however, MrConsumer had two new Sears ranges in his kitchen because of coordination problems between the delivery and installation departments at Sears. Worse, the replacement stove also came with glossy grates.

This discrepancy was predictable because of mouse print on the Sears Parts Direct website which indicated the part number for the grates on both the original range and the replacement one were the same.

Undaunted, and with a little research by MrConsumer, the correct part number for the matte grates was discovered, and the folks at Sears headquarters ordered a set of matte finish grates. What arrived? Two sets! Why? Another error on their parts site made it appear the grates were being sold individually rather than in sets.

From the start, the Sears executive who wanted to right the situation and the person at “executive resolutions” who did the heavy lifting to make it happen, were determined to see this through to a successful conclusion. The correction cost Sears, in retail dollars, over $700 (higher priced replacement stove, delivery, installation, removal, and grates cost). That is an amazing amount of money to spend to satisfy one customer… and this customer is very grateful to them for the effort. Old fashioned customer service, at least in this instance, is a live and well and living at Sears.