Well, my blog has taken the well-beaten path travelled by many of my previous blogs. I start out strong, but life gets busy and suddenly it's been 2 and a half months without a post. I'm not going to just discard this one though, as was my previous method. Hopefully in the new year I can start getting a few more posts out.
Recently I have been hearing some ads for a contest being run at one of the stores in my city. For Christmas, they decided that every day, at every store, someone would win back the money from what they purchased that day. It sounded like a pretty good contest; I mean, who doesn't want to shop for free? But at the end came the disclaimers. "No purchase necessary, see in store for details."
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't "winning your purchases" require buying something in the first place? How can a contest be "no purchase necessary" when you can't win anything without a purchase?
Of course, this isn't the first time that a company has run a contest that raised my eyebrows in this regard. There was once a bag of chips that proclaimed "Win [insert desirable prize]! No purchase necessary, see inside of bag for details". However, that at least had a shred of realism to it. Perhaps you could also visit the website for details, or obtain the information through some other means. In fact, if all you have to do is read someone else's bag of chips to figure out what you're supposed to do, then technically there really is no purchase necessary to win the contest. This store, however, wasn't even trying to pretend to follow the rules.
I thought that contests were required by law to be "no purchase necessary", but it turns out that isn't true in Canada. You can make someone purchase your product in order to gain entries, so long as you ask a skill-testing question. That strikes me as an incredibly odd way to run things, but I'll save that for another day. If this is the case, why even bother with the claim that purchases are not required to win a prize?
I do suppose you could technically enter to win back the $0 that you spent. Perhaps I should go do that now, I could really used the money.
