Pizza Hut: Coupon Fail
One of these days I’m going to sit down and hammer out all of the reasons that I prefer online ordering of pizza to ordering over the phone. Shockingly enough, it doesn’t come down to laziness (I actually get carryout anyway) but rather order accuracy, speed and paper trail.
That being said, until recently, Dominos is the only pizza place that has had a decent online ordering system. The problem with that being that my local Dominos sucks, being run by the reject cast members of a bad stoner comedy and managed by the evil father from the Twisted Sister music videos (YAY for obscure references), I would almost rather shove pins under my fingernails than set foot inside of there.
When Pizza Hut finally decided to entire the 1990’s and add an online store to their site, I was thrilled. Though my local Pizza Hut is not run much better, at least it gave me a choice and some competition, especially for price.
Though it has been up for a while, I don’t order pizza that often and finally got the chance to give it a try last night. Off the bat, Pizza Hut did everything right. They enticed me with a good deal, lured me to register for the site and even got my information.
The only thing they botched was actually giving me the deal I had clicked on, causing me to leave the site in a huff of anger and a strange hunger for McDonalds.
What happened? Well, let me explain.
The Case of the Disappearing Coupon
When I first visited the Pizza Hut site, I was hungry and broke so I was looking for a good deal. There, on the front page, was an excellent one: A $1 P’zone.
My wife and I had never tried the P’zones and were curious. We like calzones just fine so it seemed like a good meal. Besides, even if it were a buy one, get one for a dollar deal, the two of us would still eat cheaper than if we actually got a pizza.
So I clicked the link and was taken to a second page asking for my address and other information. However, on the left of all this, again, was the exact same ad for the exact same deal. I could almost taste the P’zone goodness already.
I then filled out my information, giving both my address and my zip code over to the Pizza Hut Web Gods and then was taken to their deals page where…
There was no coupon at all.
I scrolled up and down the deals page looking for this deal but it was nowhere to be found. There were all kinds of offers, some of which were also kind of good, but there were no deals at all for the P’zone. I could add them to my shopping cart. But even if I added two I was charged full price.
The end result was that the P’zone deal, advertised two times on the site itself, disappeared after they got my information.
Way to screw the pooch.
Possible Reasons
Thinking about this over the course of the night, I realized that there are three possible reasons that this could have happened.
- Website Error: It is possible that the deal ended and was just not removed from the front pages. However, this would require not one, but two separate screw ups on the Webmaster’s part and indicate a level of unprofessionalism I commonly associate with investment banks.
- Deal Not Valid at My Location: The second is that my local restaurant is not honoring that deal so it was removed from my options. However, since my order was carryout, I should have been notified of that and allowed to choose another Pizza Hut that was still close. Who knows? It might have been worth the drive. However, even if the order were delivery, I should have been notified, not just have this nice offer yanked out from underneath me.
- Bait and Switch: I don’t want to believe that a company like Pizza Hut would engage in such a 9th grade tactics, but it was the end result, regardless of intent. The only problem was that I didn’t buy into it and instead went elsewhere, with a firm promise not to buy from Pizza Hut again until I got an explanation.
On that note, I did file a complaint with Pizza Hut via their comment form and will update this post when and if they respond. However, considering that the error is still there and it has been nearly 24 hours since I contacted them, I am not hopeful. I certainly don’t expect them to bend to my will, but if this were an innocent mistake and I was the first to report it (the latter being HIGHLY unlikely), one would like to think that something would have been done almost immediately.
Bottom Line
For me, the bottom line is simple, online ordering is much more efficient than phone ordering but only if the pizza companies don’t screw it up. Though it makes me weep that Domino’s best customer service is online, it’s a fact of life and, as a result, I’m likely going to keep ordering from there.
That is, until either Papa John’s gets an online ordering system that actually works or Pizza Hut cleans up its mess.
Offline, it is a three-way horserace between the companies, online, it is clear to me that Domino’s owns the pizza-related Web.
