Dear readers,
I want to apologize for posting a coupon that Petco is now claiming to be a fraudulent coupon.
Earlier today I posted about a 50% off your entire purchase coupon at Petco and was actually pretty excited to use this coupon myself because we just recently got a Petco store in my town and I wanted to go in and get some guinea pig food because, frankly I hardly ever see coupons for guinea pig food so I thought, perfect, I will get a couple of bags with this 50% off coupon.
So I ordered a pizza from Papa Murphys for dinner (you know I had a coupon for it!) and grabbed my Petco coupon to go grab some food for my little Buttercup (my guinea pig). At Petco I put two bags of food in my cart and decided to look around a bit. Hey, I didn’t have any kids with me and I hadn’t had a chance to check out the new store yet. So of course I found a couple of other items I “needed” like a new toothbrush and toothpaste for my dogs and a couple of rope toys for my girls who love to play fetch in the backyard. I went to check out and gave the cashier my coupon. She said “I cannot accept this because it is fake” I was perplexed, the coupon was clearly hosted on their website (and in fact still is as I type this). She claimed that someone “hacked their website and created this coupon”. I said that I really doubt that is what happened and that I wasn’t going to buy anything. I told her that IF their site was hacked why was the coupon still on their website? Could it be that Petco created this coupon, which was supposed to be a mystery coupon, and made a mistake when ALL the coupons take 50% off?
Yes, that is what my gut says happened. IF their site was hacked and someone placed this coupon on their servers why is it still up? I am not the tech behind this site but even I know how to remove a page on my site if needed to? And Petco is a big company, I am sure that they have someone that can get in there and remove the coupon.
We have seen this before, when companies blame either someone for hacking/making a fake coupon or blame it on the customer when in fact someone at the company made a mistake.
And you know what, mistakes happen, not a big deal. If this was a mistake I would really hope that Petco would own up to it and just say “hey we made a mistake” and then give folks some sort of discount. This coupon DOES say “10%, 15%, 25% or 50%” discount. I guess for some people those other discounts would be better than nothing. In this case I was made to feel like I had done something wrong in trying to use a coupon I found on the PetCo website. And I made the mistake of saying I am the owner of a coupon website, and the cashiers face went from grim to dismal. I am sure she thought I myself made the coupon and put it on their website.
So dear readers, my apologies to you for posting this coupon. I am a very firm believer is making sure a coupon is valid before posting it and I did my due diligence on this one, it was (IS) hosted right on the Petco website. There isn’t much more I can do about them claiming it was fake.
Petco lost a sale on this one with me, I went to Walmart to get my guinea pig food and dog tooth stuff. I am not sure if they lost a customer, that remains to be seen I guess on if this sort of thing happens again.
Wow! I once had something like this happen at Walgreen’s online. This was quite a few years ago. I saw some canned vegetables and other foods on sale for super cheap. Like unheard of prices! I placed the order. The order didn’t arrive. So I checked on it and the order appeared to be like…stuck in my shopping cart. I finalized the order. What I didn’t do was check the prices. They went back up to the regular prices. So I wound up buying all this stuff that I didn’t really need and *never* would have bought for those prices. I learned my lesson on that one!
Tried to place an order for a piece of clothing online at another place, even longer ago than that, and the order wouldn’t go through. So I called Customer Service. They tried to tell me that the item could be sold to me but that it was $50. The website said $10 and continued to say that for about another 24 hours.
It wasnt a fake. Head on over to SD and read what really happened
Petco’s IT department screwed the pooch here, to aptly use that old military saying. They messed up BIG TIME! My best guess is that come Monday someone will be in some serious hot water. Their site wasn’t hacked. Not in any way, shape, or fashion. What happened is that their IT department was incredibly lazy when they created this promotion. The URL’s for each of the coupons was sequential, and once the two easy 10% and 15% off coupons had been found, it was incredibly easy to deduce the URL’s for the 25% and 50% off coupons. Like stupid simple. Like a third grader could have figured it out just by looking at the first two URL’s. Around 4:30pm CST Petco realized that they had a problem, so they changed the URL’s of the 25% and 50% off coupons to lead back to the 10% off coupon image. The incompetence of the IT department was truly highlighted when after they had changed the URL’s to lead only to the 10% off coupon image, they LEFT THE 50% OFF COUPON IMAGE ON THEIR SERVER! They left it in the same place it always had been, so by just directing your browser to the image itself led you to the 50% off coupon. Guess what? It’s still there as of this post!
They didn’t change the coupons in their registers though, so the 25% and 50% off coupons still were ringing up correctly. In fact, they continued to ring up correctly until the end of the day and the stores closed. To make matters worse, some stores continued to accept the 50% off coupons until they closed, while others did not. The most egregious offenders were the stores where management would loudly accuse their customers of being thieves and of using fake coupons, which they were not, while the customer was in the check out line. Those managers need to be fired. Like in, don’t show up on Sunday (today) fired. You NEVER treat your customers that way. EVER! Petco screwed up. From the IT department, to the corporate office, and then down to the store managers. Who didn’t screw up? Their customers! Many of whom ended up getting treated like dirt at the store level towards the end of the day.
Petco could have chosen a number of different ways to deal with this issue. The best way would have been to have push an update to their registers to change the 50% off coupons to another percentage like 10%, 15%, or 25%. The coupons WERE supposed to be a mystery, so this would have taken the onus off of the company and put it onto the customers. Some people might have been disappointed that the coupon wasn’t as good as they thought it was going to be, but they really couldn’t complain. Petco could also just have announced that they made a HUGE mistake, apologized, and ended the promotion early. Post signs on the door saying that, as well as doing so on Facebook and on their own website. Own up to the problem and be honest. People would have been cool with that. Again, they might have been disappointed, but that happens all the time at grocery stores where an incorrect price is put into a sales flyer, and so the stores put up signs on the door notifying their customers of the mistake. Again, simple and to the point. And then, Petco could have done what they actually did, which was to pretend that they weren’t the cause of their own problem, and then actually blame their own customers and in some cases call them liars and thieves while they were in the checkout lines. The first two would have resulted in some disappointed customers, but they would have been back. The one they chose made a whole lot of their customers hopping mad, and most certainly have cost them a large number who will never return.
Petco messed up from start to finish. All of the fault and blame lies with them. You shouldn’t feel bad about posting that link at all.
It wasn’t fraud, and nobody hacked their website. They issued the coupons in e-mails, but it was easy to tell what the percent off was by comparing the sku numbers. People quickly figured it out and passed around the 50% off ones. This was a matter of bad planning and a pathetic job by their IT guys if they didn’t want people sharing the 50% off coupon. The only “fraud” is the Petco corporate offices telling their managers that their website was hacked and that the coupons were fraudulant when they were 100% legit.
I’d also claim that when Petco changed the links for the 25% and 50% off coupons to redirect to the 10% off, it also became fraud on their part. That happened at 1pm Pacific Time. A good 5 hours where people could have legitimately seen the coupon for the first time, and would be lead to believe they could *STILL* get 50% off on their purchase when that was no longer the case.
And hacked. What a joke. Those sneaky hackers putting a coupon on our website and reprogramming all of our cash registers to accept the coupon and also telling all of our employees that the promotion was going on. (I got to use my coupon and the cashier even said to me “Think it’s going to be a 50% off?” in that “my company screwed up and I’m laughing about it because I could care less” sort of way”)
I work at petco, i can confirm that they 100% authentic coupons and what you guys said is exactly right. whatever excuse they have up in corporate/IT, i sure think theres a job position opening up fairly soon!
Yes, I am sure some heads are going to roll. I will get my resume ready!
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What’s really bad is that from some reports, Petco management at both the local and corporate level lashed out at their store level employees threatening them with being fired for accepting legitimate coupons printed from the Petco website. That’s just outrageous if it really happened, and it would most certainly cause me to never shop there again, as I could never support a company that treated its employees in such a manner. I’d love to hear from more Petco line employees about how management treated them both during and after this corporate screw up.
That is just horrible! People should not get fired for accepting a coupon that SOMEONE in the higher up messed up on!
I too would love to hear from other Petco employees on this and if this is true that people are getting fired for accepting the coupon…
I work at Petco as well. I accepted a few of the coupons before my manager recieved and email from corporate telling them the coupons were “fraudulent” I didn’t get in any trouble for taking the few that I did, and we didn’t treat any of our customers like criminals. We simply explained that our store was told that the coupons weren’t valid and that we couldn’t accept them.