Was This The Worst Promotion / Business Idea Of All Time?
Well the day we all saw coming months ago is finally here, maybe a little bit later than expected actually. The Sakura debit card is no more. It is kaput, expired, deceased, no longer a part of this world. In a move seen a mile away by anyone that has two brain cells kicking around, Sakura is ending their attempt to be business debit card kingpins. Is that even a thing? Nope I just made it up, kind of like they made up this business plan.
I mean who gives away $200 without requiring anything, literally anything at all? Was this the modern day Robin Hood where Sakura stole from the wealthy venture capitalits and willingly handed the money over to us lowly miles and points people? I mean it has to be because I can not for the life of me figure out what the end game was here.
Were they hoping businesses would take the $200 and then continue to load the card with money and they would in turn earn swipe fees? Why would any business do that? What was Sakura offering that would make a difference to any business in the world? Nothing…except a free $200!
Don’t get me wrong I am glad to have been blessed with this windfall of stupidity. It garnered me $200 I would not have had otherwise but I do question what sane person thought this was a good / credible idea.
Okay so moving on from that what does this change for us? Well Sakura says they will mail out a check for any money left in your account. If you have money still in your account I wouldn’t wait for it. Go out and flex your debit card swiping muscles and dwindle that balance down to zero. No reason to wait till tomorrow for what you could have today. There is no way to know for sure that check will ever be coming so be sure to use whatever is left, although I feel most (hopefully all) of us did that long ago.
So was this the worst business plan / promotion you can remember? Share your favorites below in the comments.
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One from way back that few of you will likely remember was Citibank’s short-lived attempted competitor to PayPal called c2it.
You could email money to people on a miles CC with no fee. That’s right, a husband could send $10000 to his wife, she could send it back five minutes later, both free, and each could earn 10000 AA miles for nothing.
Yeah, that did not last long.
And here I am thinking I had heard about all the old plays. That would have been awesome!
I don’t this qualifies as a terrible promotion but I really did maximize this one — the JetBlue free unlimited travel promotion for $599 for October 2009 — I really maximized that one. Multiple trips to destinations all around the country — Florida, Denver, Austin, Portland, LA … they definitely lost money on me that month. It was CRAZY. They never did that promotion again. Makes me feel nostalgic for the good old days when JetBlue did crazy things and had great overall customer experience compared to their competitors. Sad to say I’m switching to Delta this year after a lot of bad B9 experiences, but I’ll always be nostalgic for that month of unlimited flying.
That is a great one. I have never flown JetBlue (routing doesn’t work for me) but I have heard the customer service has dropped off some in recent years. Sad to see.
Discover/Apple Pay promotion in 2015? The 10% reward for using card with Apple pay stacked with “double cashback the first year” to give new cardmembers 22% on every Apple Pay purchase for almost 3 months. I had to buy an Apple Watch to use Apple Pay with my older iPhone, but this promo completely paid for the watch two times over!!
That was a good one for sure!
Wins my vote for the 2020 Robin Hood Awards. Take from the wealthy venture capitalists and give to us lowly miles and points people works for me. The 2019 winner was Oakland city council president Rebecca Kapan proposing to house 1,000 homeless on cruise ships and the 2021 winner may be Lizzie Warren with her student loan debt cancellation plan.
Cruise ships – interesting I will have to read about that one 🙂
JetBlue points match from Summer 2016.
Good one Laurel – that was crazy as well.