Dubai Shopping Festival 100k raffle

[shawarma]

The Dubai Shopping Festival has come up with the bright idea of a DSF 100k raffle for 2008 with a cash prize of 100,000 units of a currency of your choosing. Tick the Kuwaiti Dinars box or pick the KD day, and you'll get over 1.3 million dhs. Pick the Iranian Rial, and you'll win only 40 dirhams. Is this not a scam in the general sense of the word? Giving customers an opportunity to get tricked? Most of us know that it is possible to get ripped off in scams anywhere, including Dubai. The very simple equation is that if a customer is not as clever as the scammer, there's a chance they'll get ripped off. Hopefully common sense protects us from most scammers, while the government tries to protect us from the really clever scammers.

Perhaps DSF thought this 100k raffle idea was a clever marketing idea but imagine how the winner is going to feel if they picked the wrong box or day. Well, it's their fault for being stupid right? The winner of the small prize standing there with 40 dhs flapping about in his or her hand after stumping up 200 dhs for the ticket might be more likely to think they were ripped off. That's the kind of thing you do in a classroom to teach math, without real money at stake. Even though some customers might be idiots, it's bad marketing to treat them like that and/or draw attention to it. If DSF really wanted to be clever and promote international currency understanding, they could have had a prize list something like this:

1st prize: 100,000 Kuwaiti Dinars
2nd prize: 100,000 Omani Riyals
3rd prize: 100,000 British Pounds
4th prize: 100,000 Euros
5th prize: 100,000 US Dollars

and so on.