WOW! What a Great offer, spend about $40 and get a “Sample Bag” of all sorts of product samples, including a re-usable KIND BAR Tote Bag, and since drugstore.com has done this Sample & Tote Promo offer many times before with other brand affiliates they of course have experience and know how to do it right, or do they! Hmm. What exactly was their intention with this promo. My heart tells me that it started out on the right track, (I want so to be able to like and trust companies I do business with.) In this case my brain and my gut are talking over my heart, saying “wait a minute.”
Instead of emailing out Special Invitations with Single-Use Promo Codes, waiting to see how many invited customers act on the offer, and then having a 2nd round with any leftover Promo Sample Tote Supplies, drugstore.com apparently just sent out a huge bulk mailing, (obviously knowing as well that word spreads fast and promo codes get posted on social and coupon sites), and then they just waited for all the cash to roll in and didn’t stay on top of the process. To this customer it feels like the management and marketing staff just had fun over their weekends and didn’t feel the need to monitor and regulate their offer to ensure it stayed fair and legal. .
They seem to have neglected to TAKE DOWN the offer from the site promptly, upon surpassing the number of Promo Orders that they could honor. (I have proof of 2 orders placed about 5 hours far apart time-wise. NOT just the later order but both the EARLIER and LATER order had the promo killed, sold to me then taken away, a day later, after shipping the items I now feel manipulated into ordering.
I want so much to give drugstore.com the benefit of the doubt. I really want to be “KIND”, though some would report this seemingly borderline practice to their State Attorney Generals office, and to other state and federal agencies that drugstore.com is subject to.
Anyhow, they fill the orders that were placed in order to avail of the promo KIND BAR Sample Tote Bag, the Sample Tote was represented as AVAILABLE upon check-out, my not seeing a thing about any “back-order” wording even being quoted, and then it isn’t until the next day that they send out an ORDER CANCELED email, saying the “Back-Ordered” item will not be available. Oh, but wait, it gets better, they just used a generic phrasing from their email database and said not to worry that customers wouldn’t be CHARGED for the unavailable item, a Promo Item that was to be FREE!
If they cared about their customer relationships, they’d have made that a special APOLOGY email, with a $10 coupon without any restrictions… Maybe I’m rushing to judge, and they’re still working on some sort of damage repair efforts, I don’t know.
Either way, I will be REFUSING my orders from drugstore.com and they’ll just go back with more free shipping back to where they came from. I did try to call and express my dissatisfaction but the agent just went on about how they had no idea it would get posted “online” (something they emailed out ONLINE), and had this tone that seemed to express this feeling that someone else had done poor drugstore.com wrong.
I can’t help but feel that they were in no hurry to remove the offer from the site and that 1000’s or orders were accepted for the offer AFTER they knew full well they had no more Promo Sample KIND BAR Tote inventory left.
In the past I’ve felt drugstore.com was a decent company to do business with, and I’m hoping that this long time honorable and fair retailer, (possibly recently purchased by Walgreens), will re-think their handling of this debacle and re-address this issue with us very disappointed customers out here.
A manipulative promo that is intended to trick customers in to purchases without any real intention to ENSURE best-practices in fulfillment is all too common these days. Handling an OFFER this poorly is much much worse for a company than having no offer at all, UnLess us consumers continue to “let it go”, keeping such bad news only in Short-Term memory. Start having the memory of an elephant, and stop letting these big companies off the hook when they act badly.
We CAN shop somewhere else…
It’s going to take a lot of hard work for drugstore.com to repair the damage done, and I for one will just give up on working so hard to put all the promo CODES and OFFERS together, and I’ll just move on over to Amazon Subscribe & Save and their *can’t Beat this Pricing* thing they’ve got going, at least for now.
(Note: The topic and content offered in this article are based on my personal opinion and experiences only. While I strongly feel all data to be accurate, please enact your own verification where needed. No Liability or Guarantees offered. Isn’t that Much more honest than the reality of divisiveness behind most “guarantees” anyhow.:)
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