Over the summer, Lipton ran a promotion on their iced tea in which the bottle caps contained a code to be entered on their website to determine if a prize was won. The promotion was called “Lipton SUN/day.” Each winning cap was worth a certain number of “minutes” and the “minutes” were then redeemable for personal services, with the top prize being $6,000 worth of house cleaning (or $6,000 in cash). The advertised goal was that by winning a certain amount of service minutes, the winner thereby had freed up that much of their Sunday chore time, to be used for other, more fun activities.
I drink Lipton Ice Tea anyway because I can no longer drink coffee every day, and I really need that caffeine jolt in the morning. The promotion sounded good, so I registered on the Lipton website.
Every morning I would open my bottle of Lipton Iced Tea and then dutifully enter the cap code onto the Lipton website, never really expecting to win anything, but what the hey, you gotta be in it to win it – imagine my surprise when one of the caps won me “30 minutes” of services.
Immediately I checked the list of prizes, and discovered that 30 minutes wouldn’t buy me much of anything that I couldn’t simply do myself – for instance, 30 minutes would allow me to have someone else order a pizza for me, make a dinner reservation, arrange for a hotel room, etc. Hell, I can order my own pizza if I want one, and can probably do it way faster than someone in some foreign call center who might not even understand what pizza is.
The website said the minutes could be accumulated to qualify for a larger prize, so I continued to check those caps. And lo and behold, I got a second 30-minute winner – woo-hoo, I now had 60 minutes accumulated! But I kinda wanted that $6,000 in cash instead. So, I decided to wait.
Once I got within a month or so of the contest deadline, and it became apparent that I was not likely to win any additional minutes, I decided to redeem what I had. At the 60-minute level, I was entitled to (among other things) 60 minutes of dog-walking or 60-minutes of household cleaning (dusting, mopping, etc.)
What a dilemma – what should I choose? Puppy Cody definitely needs daily walking, and having someone else do it for a change was somewhat attractive – except that Puppy Cody is still a little skittish around strangers, and we can’t walk her down our own street due to the goofy neighbors, so each night we put her in the car and take her to the outside track at the school a few blocks away. In order to redeem my 60 minutes of dog-walking, I would likely have to take both Cody AND the dog-walker in the car over to the track. Way too much effort.
As for cleaning – I don’t want anyone coming to my house when it’s dirty! I would have to thoroughly clean the house before the cleaner got there, which seemed pointless.
Well, I’m not one to waste a prize, no matter how insignificant, so I decided to pass the winnings on to Cordelia. Again, dog-walking was not really do-able, so I opted for someone to go to her house for the 60 minutes of cleaning. She was all for it.
I submitted my request to Lipton, and immediately got an acknowledgment. Subsequently, every few days I would receive a notice that said, in effect: “I have contacted a contractor and am awaiting a reply.” I would get two of these notices a day – they were apparently working very hard to accommodate my request.
I think I received something like 20 notices that various contractors had been contacted, with no reply. Really? NO ONE was willing to provide that 60 minutes of cleaning, or wasn’t Lipton trying hard enough? I began to wonder if there really was a “personal assistant” working on my request, as Lipton claimed.
Finally, on September 15, I received my umpteenth notice that a contractor had been contacted and the reply was awaited. At that point, I decided I’d rather just have the cash instead of whatever the contractor would be paid, so I went on the website to try to relay that.
The website was closed – the contest had ended on September 13, and there was no Lipton contact information anywhere on the page that I could find.
I emailed Lipton by replying to one of my “contractor contacted” notifications – it was no real surprise that the email was returned as undeliverable.
[Come on, Lipton – I drank the damn tea and entered the damn codes. You told me I won something. You strung me along, and now you tell me there’s no way to collect?! I think the least you can do is to send me an Amazon certificate for the monetary amount of the prize you told me I won.]
I still had one of the caps, which actually had a phone number on it. Without any expectations, I called the number – and it was answered by a live, non-foreign person! I was informed that the website was back up, and that they were still working very hard to find a contractor for me. They assured me that it was not abnormal to have contacted so many contractors without response.
That call was followed by two more “I have contacted a contractor” emails. And then an email, ” I have contacted several contractors …”
[Well, that’s a little different anyway]
Finally, I received the much-awaited, “We have found a contractor who is available on [date] at [time]. Will that work for you?“
Yes!
But guess what, the time was bad for Cordelia. At least this time, I was able to reply to Lipton through their website.
And, finally, the contractor was scheduled, and the work completed. Woo-hoo!
So I guess I don’t have to organize a Lipton-Iced-Tea-dumping party after all. It’s so nice to finally be a winner!
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I love to hear from my readers. You may comment on this post, comment on my Facebook page, or email me at cordeliasmom2012@yahoo.com or notcordeliasmom@aol.com
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Images by: Mike Mozart/JeepersMedia, and Luca Masters, and Jan, and Elmer Cat , respectively
Cordelia's Mom, Still 
Ha ha you probably spent more time and money trying to get them; than the cost of a cleaner. Funny post it made me smile. Have a good day.
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I’m glad I could lighten your day. Thanks for the comment – and please come back again!
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I do believe I will, as I am following. 🏃 ✋
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🙂
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American advertising has always been a matter of buyer beware. You, CM, are probably one in a thousand for being tenacious enough to actually pursue the Lipton contest and test it. The only surprising thing about it to me is that they actually had a person assigned to field the rarity of a caller. P. T. Barnum would understand.
I recently and rather tardily renewed my AARP membership. Having ignored their earlier appeal to renew, I received a plea that promised me a “free travel bag”. I promptly forgot about it, but after a month or so, sure enough, I got it in the mail. It was in a plastic envelope, about 5″ x 7″ and 1 ½” thick. Sure enough, there it was, Shoulder strap and all. Opened up, it had three compartments with zippers, two with clear plastic so you can see the contents. Velcro closures in several places. Zippered pouch on the outside. Apparently designed for documents and to be folded after loading. Strangely, the outer pouch has a 1″ round rubber button with a “+” shaped puncture in it and I can’t figure out what that’s for. An air passage for carrying your gerbil? I tried to google it to find out, but no luck. I did find that somebody was trying to sell theirs for $5.99 on eBay.
My wife, Mollie, has been laughing at me for trying to puzzle the thing out. I have bragged that I’m an engineer and can figure stuff out, but the puncture has me stumped. I guess the amusement is worth $5.99.
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Maybe the puncture is so that when folded, you can press the extra air out, thereby fitting it better into your carry-on bag or checked luggage? Or to keep the extra air from drying out the documents?
Or maybe some sadistic designer just figured it would be a fun way to drive people crazy?
The most annoying part of my Lipton contest was that afterwards, I kept coming across bottles with the coded caps – heck, maybe one of those caps was the REAL winner for that $6,000! I’ll never know.
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All that effort and all that time to have someone come over and dust your daughter’s house for an hour? Hey, if I didn’t live on the other side of the country….
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Heck, if I had known you were interested, Doobster, I could maybe have relayed that to Lipton. They could have paid your plane fare, put you up in a hotel, and provided you with free iced tea. You wouldn’t even have had to bring cleaning supplies – they made my daughter provide the supplies, they just provided the service.
But at least I won something – doesn’t happen very often.
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You are one persistent person CM. I am impressed.
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I just hate to lose out on a freebie – they’re so few and far between.
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I would’ve followed through like that, CM. =) Gotta keep your word with me!!!!! (SNARL!)
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That’s right. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, even if you’re a huge corporation.
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Yep, don’t care who you are. And the bigger you are, the better equipped you should be to come through.
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Absolutely.
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Just dump the damned stuff in the harbor, as your ancestors did.
I didn’t get to meet either puppy Cody, or your goofy neighbors. Cody sounds safer and saner. 😀
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I did offer to let you come in and meet Cody, had there been time for you to do so. But, of course, you were already running late, having made the special trip to deliver those lollipops.
Maybe next time (Cody, not the neighbors!).
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This post has only served to confirm that Lipton is a terrible company staffed by quasi-demonic beings (probably).
It’s the most regular tea available in Thailand and it tastes like brown ink. I have to get my mum to regularly ship boxes of real tea from home.
Thanks for the laugh and well done on being so determined!
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Thanks for the comment. Not to defend the company, but they did come through eventually. It just took awhile.
And thanks for the follow. There are some exciting posts lined up. Hope you’ll enjoy them all!
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Wow! That is determination my friend… I’d have switched back to coffee and denounced the Lipton folk a long ways back in this timeline… good on ya!
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I know, but I so seldom win anything. And once I promised my daughter she could have the 1-hour cleaning, I felt obligated to follow through to the very end.
PS: Thanks for coming over to my blog. Glad to see you here!
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LoL … but now this post is making me thirsty 😉 ♥ ❤ http://youtu.be/DRaLpHoZA8E
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Love the link! Too bad Seinfeld’s not in production any more – maybe they would have picked up my post and made an episode out of it! 🙂
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Oh definitely! They’d make at least one episode from your post 😉 ♥ ❤
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