KFC president Roger Eaton may be from South Africa but he sounds Australian. No matter his accent, considering that several generations of Americans grew up hearing Colonel Sanders talk about his 11 herbs and spices in a Southern drawl, it's unsettling to hear a man who sounds like Steve Irwin's brother explaining how KFC goofed with its latest promo.
Eaton had a rough week. Those coupons that KFC gave out and Oprah touted, yeah, well, the chain is not accepting those anymore because the response was too high. Which raises the question -- if you wanted a small response why did you get Oprah involved?
Eaton doesn't answer that question in the video but he does explain that the coupons people printed off aren't worthless per se.
Instead you can redeem them at a KFC (in person only) and in return,
they'll give you another coupon good for a later date. That has done
little to quell consumers' anger. The above video is only ranked two
stars and many of the YouTube comments are too profane for the delicate sensibilities of Fat City readers.
So in less than one week, KFC has managed to make
customers mad by running out of chicken, having its Web site crash and
finally canceling the coupon. That's on top of the beating
Oprah has taken in the blogosphere for her work with the company.
But considering that grilled chicken has already failed three times at
KFC, should anybody have expected anything different this time?
Finally,, yes, I know the difference between an Australian and South African
accent. I had dinner with a South African two weeks ago and so I'm
pretty fresh on what a South African accent sounds like. While Eaton
does say certain syllables like a South African (the hard tent in president) overall he sounds more like an Aussie. Probably because he's worked in Australia for a good portion of his life.
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KFC can kiss my petutie. I'll eat Popeye's from now on when I want fried chicken.
actually I downloaded the pdf from the official site, maybe the put it up temporarily when their servers went down.
KFC's only alternative was either accepting a bunch of bogus coupons or forcing their employees to deal with the issue, so I'm not surprised at this. I saw all kinds of downloadable PDF and JPG versions of the coupon, all of which were fraudulent by the terms of the promotion. (only coupons printed directly from the site were valid)
There's a box near the top of the coupon - just to the left of the barcode - that's the validation device. On a copy, the text in that box will be smeared-looking. On a legit coupon, it's sharp and clear. If you look at an original and a copy side-by-side, it's pretty obvious.
So KFC knew that this would be a mess. Their employees would likely have to deal with pretty much constant attempts at redeeming bogus coupons, and the results weren't going to be pretty. This way, the coupons can be examined at leisure for forgery and fraud, and they've got the name and address of the person it came from if they need it.
I suspect most of the phony coupons won't even be submitted, and the ones that are will simply receive a nice form letter on the evils of coupon fraud instead of a different coupon for a free dinner. If anyone wants to push it, well, as it says right on the coupon itself, "coupon fraud punishable by law."
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