The thing about useful stuff is

Thought I'd better get round to using my Threshers voucher courtesy of my chums at Stormhoek, the existence of which has managed to get a wee bit of publicity.

Being lazy well prepared, and despite there being a store about 0.5km away, I thought I'd check out what they stocked in the stores and at what price by looking at the Threshers website - I never shop there ordinarily.

Unbelievable - their website is offline. Must be my mistake. NO. I check 10 times and with different browsers etc. They have taken their website down.

So it appears that at a time when they are likely to be generating tens of thousands of hits, looking at what Threshers have to offer, people like me who rarely look at Threshers, the've pulled the plug.

Presumably their current infrastructure evidently can't cope with the demand and one can understand that they might be unwilling to make a long term investment. But hasn't their IT Director heard of temporary hosting arrangements offered by the big hosting companies? Was itfelt to be too expensive or just not worth the bother for this "short term blip".

They are CRAZY.

You may question why I think they should incur the extra expense when they are already taking a beating with the voucher. Simple. This is likely to be the biggest attention they've had ever - much bigger than they are likely to have gotten having paid Gordon Ramsey £500k (or whatever) to promote their stores over Xmas. So they are wasting an opportunity to present themselves to customers. Sure, these same people are likely to go into the stores anyway, but in my experience the stores are unlikely to be able to achieve the same promotion effect.

How much would this much publicity have cost them in advertising - BIG MONEY; Lots of people I know are talking about it, because it seems an unbelievable deal - "wow, they must be losing money on this; better get it whilst we can". Has Threshers ever been a topic of nationwide conversation before - nope.

Oh well, no point disrupting the IT dept, after all its only the attention that the business ordinarily craves.

UPDATE: Just had a chat with the two chaps that work in my local store. Ordinarily it does about £11k per week. Last Saturday it took £7,500 post discount.

They also told me that in one of the stores in London somebody had re-produced the coupon but bearing a 90% discount. Oddly enough it was stopped, but warranted a group wide alert!

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Name: John Wilson

Location: London, United Kingdom

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