“We’re trying to create customers for life and make the store relevant and fun,” store owner Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale told TV station KHOU. Free furniture is super fun.
Here’s how the promotion worked: the store owner picked a team by flipping a coin. That team was Denver. Customers who spent $6,000 or more on furniture before Sunday evening would receive their purchases for free if the Seahawks won. They did.
Of course, that $7 million figure isn’t quite true: that’s the retail cost of the free couches and mattresses, not what the store originally paid for them. It’s the profit and overhead that the local chain will forgo, in exchange for lots of goodwill and good publicity. You’d think that McIngvale would have learned his lesson: most shoppers chose either the Broncos or the Seahawks to win their respective division championships when the store had a similar promotion a few weeks ago. For that sale, customers could choose which teams they wanted to bet on, and win their furniture if they were right.
Mattress Mack Refunds More Than $7 Million to Customers for Lost “Super Bowl Bet” Promotion (Thanks, Rachael!)
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
The loophole behind Aereo, the service that lets people watch broadcast TV from Internet-connected devices, is that for every streaming viewer, there’s one teeny antenna at Aereo HQ. This helps the company get around copyright restrictions, since each viewer of local broadcasts has their own antenna (just not in their home.) The company recently announced that it’s run out of capacity in New York City, the first area where it launched, and is expanding to the San Antonio, Texas metropolitan area. 