That store is almost quaint in its cluelessness

Wow, who could have possibly predicted that this offer would get out of hand in a recession?

Ahh, the greed of the internet. I think it's clear that "share" and "fan" were meant in the facebook context, but I can understand why people would take it beyond that forum.

Getting enraged is just silly, as it's very easy to understand why the store did what it did. Sure, they pulled a promotion early, but it's not like this is the first time it's happened. If I find a really good deal, I take advantage of it as soon as I can, because I can't count the number of times deals have been been cancelled or ended early thanks to the coupon-sharing sites. The worst was this winter, when my office got a great offer from Dell through the mail. I jumped on it, but found out the promotion had been cancelled before I even got the ad in the mail, as the deal had been "leaked" on all the deal forums.

Michael Scott printed coupons like that for Dunder Mifflin. Marsh Marketing team should watch The Office :P

it doe snot say that they can end this promotion @ anytime

"An unauthorized manner? You mean that large numbers of people printed out a coupon uploaded to the Internet? No!" No, probably slickdealers re-posting the coupon on their forums thus flooding the retailers with more than expected people attempting to redeem their codes.

@Traveshamockery:

The grocery store shrink ray has finally hit the
doe snot containers, both canned and frozen.

@Karita:
Once the coupon gets posted on a deal site, forget about it. Additionally, it doesn't sound like the coupons were unique, so a single person could likely get away with using several of them.

Here's a cut & paste section of an email I sent a regional grocery store chain here about a $5.00 coupon that never happened:

Additionally, regarding the ad circular vs. your web home page: the circular that was received in the mail Saturday had a large note on the top right of page (front side) stating "introducing our smart shopper club - Get a $5 coupon when you join at www.save-a-lot.com", well I did go to your web site late Sunday night/early Monday morning and sign up: I thought it odd that the promotion was not specifically mentioned there and never received a coupon by email. Now today I see a special link to sign up that specifically mentions the promotion: did the promotion get advertised before the web site was ready to process it?

Never heard back of course, no coupon.

Sounds like some "genius" in their marketing dept thought this up but didn't plan out all of the details. If you are going to put any type of offer on the internet, expect it to go viral; now they have a PR nightmare on their hands that will likely do more damage than if the had just sucked it up and accepted all of those "unauthorized" coupon floating around.

As an Indy native, I love Marsh and am bummed to hear they messed up and are getting bad press. But it's not egregious enough to make me not shop there anymore....

@Mr_Human: I've run some contests and promotions as part of marketing campaigns in the past and the legal run-around to get one off the ground is daunting. My bet is that the doofus who launched this sucker is now out of work.

@hillsrovey: I don't know, this doesn't surprise me that much ... of course as we've seen, it's easy to mess up any promotion involving the innernets, but then I've not been a big fan of Marsh since the one by me took out their U-Scan lanes and replaced them with seating for the weird cafe-like thing they're trying to do. (Not that it was a big change: the lanes were rarely open outside of narrowly-defined rush hours. Kroger doesn't have that problem and I've been shopping there since.)