To say sorry for a outage to their streaming service on Sunday night, Netflix sent around an apology email this morning with a link to click on to get 3% credit off your next bill. Reader Stephen says, “Interesting that Netflix is willing to offer the discount but only to those who open the email and click the link. Wouldn’t the right thing be to give the discount to everyone?”

Rather than give a discount to customers who lost access as well as those who lost the potential to access the streaming, Netflix is giving the discount to a smaller subset. They’re giving the credit to the customers who satisfy all the following conditions:

* the email didn’t get stuck in their spam filter
* they opened it
* they read it
* either said “yup, I saw that outage” OR “I have no moral qualms about clicking this link”
who did not at that moment experience catastrophic mouse failure with no backup mouse around
* and who clicked the link

At any step failing to meet one of the above conditions would mean the credit stays in Netflix’s pocket instead of yours, which is certainly cheaper than giving out a mass credit.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.