When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something.
A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger King, so he picked up a huge stack of these cards and spent a night scratching off all the spaces from all of them. It turned out they had a control code at the bottom that could be correlated back to the card configuration, so he was able to put together a cheat sheet that had the winning moves for every code.
All that month, meals for every kid in the school would consist of walking into Burger King, asking for a "Complimentary Game Card", which they were legally obligated to provide. Then, after a minute of consultation at a table, returning to the counter: "Looks like I won a small fries. And could I have another game card?"
Fun times. The kid who discovered the pattern claimed to have won a Carribbean Cruise.
I haven't been to BK in a while, but during grad school the back of every receipt asked you to call a number, complete a survey, write down a code, and redeem the receipt for a free Whopper. The code consisted of two letters corresponding to the month (the key to which was easily found online) and four digits (which I just randomized).
The kicker was that BK would give you the free Whopper...and a receipt for the free Whopper. And the cycle continues.
This reminded me of the time when I was a kid (maybe 5 or 6 years old), I went with my aunt to buy the newspaper or something like that. They were also selling these scratch lottery tickets and my aunt would usually buy me one or two.
I don't really remember how, but I figured out that the scratch-off paint on the winning tickets had a slightly jagged edge.
My aunt couldn't beleive it, nor could the seller: she would buy me the first ticket, I'd pick it out, scratch it and use the proceeds to buy another one. This went on for a few days... After my aunt bought me the first one, I'd proceed going through the whole stack until I picked out all the winning tickets.
Unfortunately, the best I could do is win back the money invested, as the most frequent prize amount was the price of the ticket.
I was once in San Francisco at a Burger King and noticed one of the workers doing something besides working while I was waiting for my food. They were scratching the scratch off tickets for whatever contest was going on at the time. I decided to snap a picture with my (horrible) cell phone at the time to send to the consumerist when the manager noticed me. She quickly ran over to the worker and told the worker to go do that in an area more private. I was pretty shocked, but I enjoyed my burger and went on.
We did the same thing. BK even changed up the codes after a while but we just kept at it until we had a key for the new codes. I bet this is still a story they tell at BK about how that stupid promotion cost them 100x what they thought it would.
I wonder if they ever got any value out of it? BK did become the high-school hang-out after that. I just wonder if that's a good thing for people trying to run a business.
When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something.
A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger King, so he picked up a huge stack of these cards and spent a night scratching off all the spaces from all of them. It turned out they had a control code at the bottom that could be correlated back to the card configuration, so he was able to put together a cheat sheet that had the winning moves for every code.
All that month, meals for every kid in the school would consist of walking into Burger King, asking for a "Complimentary Game Card", which they were legally obligated to provide. Then, after a minute of consultation at a table, returning to the counter: "Looks like I won a small fries. And could I have another game card?"
Fun times. The kid who discovered the pattern claimed to have won a Carribbean Cruise.