There are very few promotional emails I actually enjoy getting, although I get about a dozen a day (these are subscription emails, not spam. I get nearly 1000 spam emails a day to my work email). The one from Geeks is one of my favorites. I don’t think I’ve actually bought anything from them yet but I love seeing what deals I could have. Their latest email finally had me pulling plastic out of my wallet until I was almost done checking out.

According to the subject of the email, I would expect to be “Seeing Double for Half the Price @ Geeks.com.” Doesn’t this speak to the bargain hunting region of your brain, the one connected directly to that nerve center also known as the magnetic strip of your credit card? It makes me think that there’s a promo where I get double for half the price of one.

In the email, the following promotion follows:

This ad confirms my prior inclination that I will in fact be receiving two of something for the price of one-half, saying “Buy one get one free just 34.99 each.”

A new-customer-registration sub plot thickens

Of course in order to purchase from Geeks you have to create a user account. I attempted to use my email address but that one was already taken, obviously, because that’s how I got the email promo in the first place. I try to log in using that email but I’ve never bought from Geeks, so the taken email address doesn’t work. So I give them one of my gmail addresses. When I’m getting ready to check out, it appears that there are too many units of the product in my shopping cart and no way to edit that on that page. So I have to start all over, but of course, now my gmail email is already registered but I haven’t registered an actual account to buy anything because I guess it creates your purchasing account after you’re done with the purchase because I try logging in with the gmail address and still nothing.

So now I have Geeks emails going to two of my addresses but still no account is created. So far so awesome.

So anyway, I finally get to where I’m about to pay and notice that I’m paying twice as much as I thought. I go back to the email promotion and sure enough in small print in between promos on the email it says that the deal is really just two for one:

Even the star next to the price in the email isn’t directly next to the bad news, it’s just next to the promo code. The bad news is in the fine print below: that you’re really paying 69.99 for two units, not 34.99. It does read ‘price with code: 34.99 each’ under the price, but that to me sounded like one unit was 34.99 and then you get a second one free. Wouldn’t any logically thinking person think this after all the things that had been previously read?

I work for an internet retailer and we’d never put that kind of price trickery knowingly into an email. I can’t really chalk it up as an honest mistake on their part because when we send out promo emails half a dozen pairs of eye balls goes through the email carefully before it gets sent out, and I’m sure we’re much smaller than Geeks.