[quote name='The End']I can easily see where the date listed at the end of the survey was simply a mistake. And maybe they needed to correct that mistake. But it probably would have been better if they had just announced that the date on the survey was an error. Some people might have been a bit ticked off, but most of us are reasonable people. I'm sure that we can understand that mistakes happen.
It would have been a lot better than pretending that nothing happened.[/QUOTE]
That's the thing, it wasn't an error. It was supposed to expire January 1, 2013. But because of how much it got spread around and used they decided to cancel it weeks earlier. Here's what a staff member actually said on the situation in a topic about the coupon on their site:
"The reason we had to pull the date closer was because it was an associated discount for completing our survey.
We had an absolutely massive response within just a few short days and hit (and surpassed drastically) the quota we needed to hit for the data. The discount code was also being spread at an incredible rate around the web. While we'd naturally expect this to happen anyway, eventually, it was still a bit of a shock to how much of an impact it made.
We could have stopped the voucher code outright, but we felt it would be better to give you guys a solid week's time to make use of it. While we understand that could annoy some folks, especially if you were waiting for payday in December, there was an incredible number of people who were using it already.
I hope this helps.
-James"
So yeah, he said they hit their quota for the amount of data they needed (for the surveys I'm assuming) and decided to cancel the coupon early. So plenty of people did actually fill out the survey (myself included), and once they got what they wanted they canceled the voucher. Sure they gave customers a week before canceling it, but most of us simply got a generic e-mail saying "Thanks for the survey, here's 35% off" days before it ended, instead of something like "Unfortunate news regarding the 35% off survey voucher". I didn't bother reading the e-mail since it sounded like a reminder about it expiring January 1st. If they worded it differently and gave me a heads up I would have read it. I still would have been annoyed, but not as much as I am now with how they handled it.