They Do Chicken Right. Coupons? Not So Much...

A friend turned me onto a cool promotion today: KFC, in an effort to hawk its new grilled chicken in a big way, had a website where you could go and supposedly print a coupon for a free meal featuring the grilled chicken. (And if you go to the site, don't let the association with the Oprah Winfrey Show scare you; I'm not by any means a viewer, and I'm sure my friend who told me about it isn't either. But news of free food spreads fast, no matter the source.) Anyway, that's all you had to do--go to the site, print the coupon. Sounds easy, right?

If only. Let me list the things I experienced today while not printing the coupon:

• At least ten "site too busy; come back later" errors.


• Probably twice that many "cannot open the page because the server dropped the connection" errors.


• The coupon was being handled by a third-party site, coupons.com, that required you to install their special software on your computer, ostensibly because each coupon had a unique bar code so you couldn't go print a hundred of them and pass them out to your office or something. I installed the software successfully, according to my computer, but hitting the "print coupons" button returned me to the page that said I hadn't installed their software yet. (I even did so a second time, with the same results.)


• Once I finally got to the page that should have printed it, I was told that I had an unsupported browser--this despite the fact that I was using the only browser (Safari) listed for my OS (Mac OS "10.3 or higher"). I even tried it on (unsupported) Firefox and actually got a bit farther through the process than I did with Safari--but still no coupon.


• Eventually, I must have passed my quota of hitting the print button, because I was told on each browser that I had surpassed the number of allowed times to print the coupon, even though I never had jack squat come through my printer.


• And for the nasty icing on this rancid cake, my attempts to send a complaint message to coupons.com yielded nothing but error messages themselves!

I know I'm not the only person who had trouble with this; Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun had the same problem, as did a legion of commenters to his post (which was also punctuated by snarky trolls whose basic thought was "quit whining and go spend five bucks already!").

This isn't exactly a shining moment for either KFC, which is obviously trying hard to remake its image (since lots of people know that the F stands for "fried"), and coupons.com, which didn't exactly win any friends either. I did submit a "comment" to KFC on their page, so we'll see what happens.

Did any other Musings reader try this? And if so, did you have any luck? Let me know in the comments.