Engadget is sponsoring a 100 gadget giveaway, with each contest running for six hours. I just entered and they have some pretty cool gadgets to give us. Go check it out, the current one runs until noon.
Contests
Blog Battle Royale – VOTE FOR ME NOW!!!
Catchy headline anyway. Here’s the deal. Every month (for the time being anyway) PPP is having a contest and giving something away. The contest is the Blog Battle Royale. Details on the contest (and the link to vote) are here. Basically we all wrote and entry about what type of robot we would create, what it would look like, what it would do, how it would be marketed, etc…Of course mine is a bit off-kilter like everything around here. Here is my entry into the contest, the Sooper Dooper SurrogateChild 2000.
There are 36 blogs competing against each other and the five that have the most votes when voting ends at noon on Monday each get an iRobot Roomba, one of those vacuum robots. Pretty sweet, no?
There are some pretty good entries, so go read them and vote for your favorite one. If you don’t have time to read them all, that’s OK just vote for me because I have the best looking hat AND a drawing of the darn thing (the robot as well as my hat) and if you show up to the blogmeet in Helen in October I will cut you up and feed you to the fishies in the Chattahoochee if you haven’t!!
Oh by the way, leave me a comment and let me know what you think about the robot!
Track-Posted to Stop the ACLU’s Friday Free for All.
Trackposted to Samantha Burns, Blue Star Chronicles, Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, Rosemary’s Thoughts, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, Webloggin, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Public Domain Clip Art, The Uncooperative Radio Show! Special Weekend!, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Faultline USA, third world county, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Scratch and Win
People are funny sometimes. You can take a handful of people that don’t gamble, enter contests or buy lottery tickets and give them a couple of scratch scratch and win cards and watch them ‘go to town’ on the things. The stores that I run are fairly busy in the evening, more so than the company average and that means selling more steaks and other supper items. As a result my food cost is higher than the average as well. It’s a constant battle to get it down to where I want it. We are actually running a couple of contests for my hourly employees in order to raise awareness and to recognize the associates that are doing a good job. One of them is that whichever store has the most improvement this fiscal period, all of the associates get T-shirts. The other thing we are doing is with smaller stuff like gift cards and scratch off cards with different prizes and monetary amounts. The associates love it.
Instant Win Productions is a company that specializes in scratch and win games. We’ve also used the scratch and win cards to give out coupons to customers as well and they handle these types of things as well as huge monetary amounts as well. They have very competitive prices and supply a quality product when you need it.
In addition to scratch off cards they also manufacture Phone cards, Internet Access cards, scratch-n-sniff cards and Bingo game cards as well. Instant Win Promotions is one of the quality game printers in the United States and they are based in the Chicago area, so when you buy from them you know you are supporting and American company and not some guys sitting in Asia making money on the cheap.
One thing I mentioned at the top of the post about people loving scratch-off games is very true. I don’t play the lottery very often and I never play the scratch-off games but if you give me some of them, it doesn’t matter what I am doing, I will commence to scratching to see if I have won anything. The scratch off games from Instant Win Productions are printed on high quality paper that won’t bleed or smear like you might get from some of the local printers or if you tried to create them locally with your own resources.
On occasion I will have a small stack of the scratch off games that we use as customer coupons and they go like wildfire. I usually do my business with the places around my stores and the people that work there seem to be able to sense when I have them because they will literally ask if I have any of the scratch off cards. We give out very simple prizes such as free drinks and the occasional meal, but they definitely can’t get enough of them.