Ever look at a contest, sweepstakes, or giveaway and wonder, “Why did they even bother?” That’s exactly what happened with a JetBlue offer I received via email about a week ago.
The email said they were “wrapping up their 25th birthday year” by giving you a chance at TrueBlue points and tickets to either a Boston Celtics game or a Brooklyn Nets game (JetBlue, of course, has a very strong presence in both Boston and NYC).
What JetBlue promised
These were the potential prizes:
- 1 Grand Prize winner would receive 25,000 TrueBlue points, plus a pair of game tickets.
- 5 First Prize winners would receive 5,000 TrueBlue points, plus a pair of game tickets.
- 5 Second Prize winners would receive 2,500 TrueBlue points.
Here’s the email:
So, a typical sweepstakes—essentially, you put your name into a hat, and if they pick your name, you win.
Granted, the sweepstakes did have some caveats—there were the typical “Legal residents of the contiguous U.S. or DC” (sorry, Hawaiians and Alaskans, but I’m sure you’re kind of used to that by now), you had to have a TrueBlue account (but you could make on the spot, then enter), and entries would only be accepted through December 12 – so you only had a week. Fair enough.
How it actually played out
I got the email on Friday, December 5th, at 12:54 pm. I’m typically REALLY good at reading my emails, and this time was no different – I opened it at 12:58 pm. Granted, I had just earned 350,000 TrueBlue points, but there was nothing wrong with trying to get 25,000, 5,000 or even 2,500 more, right? So I clicked on the link.
Remember, this was four minutes after I received the email. Just FOUR MINUTES! And this is what I got when I clicked on the link:
Yep, you read that right – they’d reached the maximum number of entries FOUR MINUTES after the email started hitting inboxes (my email provider of choice for stuff like this is Yahoo, by the way – it’s typically pretty quick at delivering emails). FOUR MINUTES!
So then I started doing some research, and apparently JetBlue has, according to its investor/earnings materials, “more than 30 million members.” (JetBlue doesn’t publish an exact, always-current count, but according to ChatGPT [which I know is not the “be-all, end-all” of information], the number has been hovering in the high-20-million to low-30-million range since roughly 2022–2024.)
So 30 million members, of which a whopping 20,000 were able to enter. That’s less than 1/10th of 1% of their members – no wonder they reached 20,000 entries in less than 5 minutes. And actually, the fact that they gave people “a week” to enter is laughable.
Really, JetBlue—why even bother?
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