Saturday, July 28, 2012

The Mysterious Foursquare Special...

So, there is a home-grown burger place here in Pullman that Mark and I love. I went there yesterday to get some burgers and slushies, and when I checked in via Foursquare, I saw this:
 
It looked a bit too good to be true, but I shrugged and figured I'd show it to the person taking my order and see what would happen. $5.00 is, in fact, $5.00. When I showed my phone to the person at the till, she didn't know anything about it. She asked her supervisor - and then called the manager. No one knew anything about this. No worries on my part, but I noted to them that they might want to check up on this as other Foursquare "players" might be asking about it. 

Afterwards I thought about it - it seemed one of two things was going on. Either 1), the burger place had in fact created a Foursquare special, but had done a lousy job of telling their employees. This was clearly not the case in this instance. The other option, 2) was some sort of Foursquare spam (which reminded me I had gotten at least one piece of email spam via my Foursquare account). 

So just now I was thinking about this again, and I thought to look at the web version of Foursquare. When I did, I saw this:

 Oh! All is explained! Maybe I should have guessed something based on the sponsor. But...in the phone version of Foursquare there was nothing (at least that I can recall)  indicating that this special was just for people paying with an AmEx card - also, I was there on the 27th and it was still showing up on my Android version of Foursqure.  This is clearly confusing, and could result in some ill will directed towards the nice people (and they are!) at the burger joint. Tomorrow I will stop by the burger place and show them this just in case other Foursquare users come checking in...classes will be starting in a few weeks and college students are trickling back into campus. 

Social media. Its tricky...


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