Domino’s And Contest Winner Disagree About How Calendars Work

dominonoThis baseball season, Domino’s Pizza is running a promotion where fans can get a code for a free pizza after the first two no-hitters of the year. While many people were shut out of the code-generating website, reader Jim wasn’t one of them. He got a code. The problem is that he and Domino’s disagree about how calendars work, and now he has no free pizza.

On May 25, Josh Beckett of the Los Angeles Dodgers pitched a no-hitter. That part, everyone agrees on. How the promotion works is that the free pizza website opens up at noon on the first business day after the game. In this case, that was Tuesday, May 27, since the 25th was a Sunday and the 26th was a holiday. “The first calendar day after May 27 is May 28, the second is May 29, …, the fifth is June 1, so the offer codes should expire at 11:59pm PDT on June 1,” writes Jim. Except his didn’t.

Here’s what the DomiNoNo (that name just reminds me of a certain hair-removal device) page actually says:

PROMOTION TIMING: The Promotion will be made available starting at 12:00 pm (noon) Pacific Daylight Time (“PDT”) on the first (1st) business day following a No-Hitter (“Offer Start Day”) and will end at 11:59 pm PDT on the fifth (5th) calendar day after the Offer Start Day, or while supplies last (each such period, a “Promotion Window”). Promotion codes must be claimed and redeemed during the Promotion Window.

“I tried to redeem my code at 1pm EDT (10am PDT) and it was rejected as ‘invalid for the date of [my] current order’,” Jim wrote to Consumerist. The most likely explanation is that the mysterious “supplies” ran out because it was toward the end of the promotion period, but we checked with Domino’s and will update this post when we hear something back.

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