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Subway: ur doin it rong
By Kristen | May 29, 2008
Subway is holding a contest for kids: Every Sandwich Tells a Story! The grand prize: a measly $5K in athletic equipment, which would buy what… two treadmills and someone’s Bowflex from Craigslist?
Anyway, Subway made one fatal flaw. Buried under the prizes is this:
Contest is open only to legal US residents, over the age of 18 with children in either elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted. (emphasis mine)
Oh… Subway dudes, you do NOT want to piss off the homeschoolers.
Homeschoolers, already irritated by the world at large, are easily angered and are organized. This contest started a couple of days ago and already Subway’s been deluged with emails.
And yet! Does Subway change the rules of the contest? Add a clause saying if a homeschooled kid wins, s/he can donate the equipment to the school or organization of their choice? Noooooo.
We at SUBWAY restaurants place a high value on education, regardless of the setting, and have initiated a number of programs and promotions aimed at educating our youth in the areas of health and fitness.
We sincerely apologize to anyone who feels excluded by our current essay contest. Our intention was to provide an opportunity for traditional schools, many of which we know have trouble affording athletic equipment, to win equipment. Our intent was certainly not to exclude homeschooled children from the opportunity to win prizes and benefit from better access to fitness equipment.
To address the inadvertent limitation of our current contest and provide an opportunity for even more kids to improve their fitness, we will soon create an additional contest in which homeschooled students will be encouraged to participate. When the kids win, everyone wins!
Oh, NUH-UH. You did not just say “[w]e sincerely apologize to anyone who feels excluded by our current essay contest” because that is a shitty boyfriend apology. If the apology has an “if” in it (as in, “we’re sorry if you felt excluded”): it’s not really an apology.
You could have settled this once and for all, but no! You just took a bad situation and made it even worse. “Yeah, you still can’t enter our contest, but we’ll make up another one or something later. Good enough?”
Subway dudes: FOR THE WIN!
Hilarious addendum!: The original page for the Subway contest had several words misspelled: the prizes included a “bastket” and the contest was only open to people in the “Untied States.” Those errors were fixed. The most glaring one of all… not so much.
Topics: WTF?, Crappy PR, Not Gezellig! |
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May 29th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
No home schools will be accepted? WHAT?????
This defies a response. I keep trying to come up with a witty and scathing response to this utter bullshit, but I simply can’t. I’m too shocked.
May 30th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I! KNOW!
Not to mention this: “To address the inadvertent limitation of our current contest…”
Uh, unless “no home schools will be accepted” was some kind of massive typo, that’s not inadvertent. In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of advertent right there.
Dictionaries are our friends, Subway dudes!
May 30th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I agree, home schoolers should be excluded. Subway is trying to reach the most people for a small amount of money. Why then would they just give it to a family? Also the money can go much farther given to an actual school.
May 30th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I don’t know what the homeschooling vibe is in your area, but here, homeschoolers generally form mini-communities. We fund our resources largely from our own pockets (in fact, a long standing joke is that when government types start squawking too much about the growing homeschooling trend, we should all stick our kids in school at the same time, and see what the sudden influx of kids, and subsequent demand on already stretched resources does to the system).
I know that within the homeschooling community up here athletic equipment is a desperately needed resource. It would really be put to good use, and could certainly serve more than one family.
June 28th, 2008 at 1:26 pm