Monday, January 21, 2008

Pizza Hut's Book It Program - Now With SMS

This year, we were introduced to Pizza Hut's Book It program from Adam's school. Now, I am all for reading incentives, but encouraging obesity along with it? Obviously, this is also a marketing ploy to bring families into Pizza Hut every month. Elementary school-aged kids need to be brought in by their parents and parents needs to pay for their own meals as well as any preschool siblings, so there's good money to be made. Over the summer, I had the unfortunate experience of having my credit card number stolen at a Pizza Hut, so we had been avoiding it like the plague. Since our kids aren't obese, we decided to use the vouchers for the free personal pan pizzas. We actually missed the first two months of vouchers because I didn't realize that they expired within a month and was saving them up to buy pizzas for the whole family. Now that we've gone twice, Adam voraciously reads his allotment of books each month to get his next voucher.


The problem with Pizza Hut is that it is restaurant. My kids are not restaurant kids. Sure, they are somewhat occupied by the activity sheets and crayons, but they inevitably end up goofing off, making too much noise, going under the table, you name it.


Pizza Hut is now supporting ordering through SMS text messaging as well as through the web. Now, this will definitely streamline our Book It experience. I can place an order on their mobile web site on the way so we save time and aggravation. You just need to register with their site to use this service.

However I was discouraged by their lack of privacy options in their membership process where I HAD to:
I agree to receive information about Pizza Hut®/WingStreet® coupons, promotions, announcements, events and specials and agree to the Pizza Hut Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and the WingStreet® Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
Most sites nowadays allow you to register and opt out of the spam. Plus I had to provide a password with both letters and numbers. It's Pizza Hut, not a bank for crying out loud! Oh well, I guess I'll sacrifice spam for some peace while we're there.

2 comments :

Nina S said...

I read about PH's program a while back. Educators generally don't approve because it's not a very good incentive to get children to read. At least, those kids who are only doing it for the pizza. They tend to pick easy books, those below their reading levels.

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