Another amazing tale of idiot behavior from a business appeared yesterday in Rochester, NY and across the country. You can read all about it in the Democrat and Chronicle. The franchisees of Popeye’s chicken ran out of chicken.
You can watch a local TV report of it on YouTube here. Get past the racial nature of all the clips’ comments which are numerous and disgusting. As retailers or small business owners you should recognize damage when you see it.
Just last week we saw Amazonfail where “someone” mysteriously removed gay and health titles from Amazon.com. Then Domino’s in Conover, NC with the employees boasting on camera how they put food up or wiped it on various parts of their body and then served it.
Now comes the spectacle of franchisees not buying enough chicken to support a major ad campaign of their core product. It would be like Starbucks saying, “sorry out of coffee.”
I mean, how stupid do you have to be to not go out and buy more chicken from your distributor, Costco, or even several grocery stores to save the day? Pretty stupid if you are a customer.
I ran into this on a small scale at the mega-grocery store Pavilions in Newport Beach, California. I’d ordered a pastrami on rye at the deli. The order taker came back to me, “Sorry, we’re out of rye bread. You want it on sourdough?” “Um, can’t you just walk over and get some rye from the bread aisle?” “Sorry sir, we’re not allowed to do that.” Who eats pastrami on sourdough? I walked out and never came back.
Were Popeye’s franchisees’ thinking, “We’re not going to be making any money on this so we’ll just run out?” Was this was an “accident?” Restaurants know their numbers. The deal was $4.99, not free.
Some franchisees complained in the press of people “trying to make multiple orders when it clearly said, ‘one per customer.’” Customers hate exceptions – people driving home on a Friday night, tired and looking to feed their family would OF COURSE want to buy more than one.
Did Popeye’s CMO Dick Lynch not have a clue as to how this could play out? I doubt it. They wanted buzz and a “killer promotion” and got it while angering people along the way. Not just anyone but their loyal customers.
The right thing to do would have been for the owner to have been personally handing out rainchecks for another day. That would have taken guts and saved the sale and the relationship with loyal customers, rather than those franchisees who took the easy way out by taping a sign across the drive-thru speaker and closing early, some in mid-afternoon.
It reminds me of the old days at Sears when they advertised a washer for $99. The salesmen on the floor called it the golden stake. It was to lure customers in but if you sold it you were gone. I believe the words then were, “bait and switch.”
With Popeye’s you just got “bait.”
If you want to create a promotion, you have to plan for what happens when it fails – like we’ve all had with boxes and boxes of widgets to giveaway clogging the back room – and what happens if it is a runaway.
Clearly, something went wrong with Popeye’s promotion and now it is all over the Internet with friends telling friends, “can you believe Popeye’s chicken ran out of chicken?” Just like I just did to all of you.
KFC got a boost on Oprah yesterday when she told people about the Free chicken offer from KFC. I went to the site to try it out but, like just about everyone else on Twitter, after installing the coupon printing program, couldn’t get it to print.
