It was my birthday this week and I got a coupon in my email from Red Robin for a free burger. Since I never lose emails but tend to misplace papers, I kept the coupon in my email until the day that we were supposed to go use it. Half an hour before we were to go out, I fired up my email to print off the coupon and was dismayed to find this:

Apparently I was over my viewing limit.  Yes, I know I should have read the text at the top that says that I can only view the offer twice.  But I have a multi-pass system of sorting through emails since I get hundreds per day.

So we didn’t have a coupon and we didn’t go to Red Robin for dinner.  I know that Red Robin is under no obligation to give birthday coupons.  I was frustrated that their system was designed so poorly and I’d imagine hundreds of other people are experiencing this same issue.  Red Robin probably implemented this to stop coupons from being redeemed multiple times.

Here are the weaknesses in this process:
-People who (like me) load their email several times and will therefore be prevented from legitimately loading the coupon when they need it
-Somebody who actually wants to “beat the system” could easily print the coupon to pdf (on the first viewing) and send that to friends. Or merely print several copies of the coupon.
-It’s not very user-friendly. What about people who aren’t connected to a printer the first time they try to load it and whose printer doesn’t work when they try to print it on the second view?

Update: I emailed customer service about the issue. They responded by resetting the counter and re-emailing the coupon. We used the coupon and had some great hamburgers. Props to Red Robin! If only it didn’t have to be an issue in the first place…