Alright, time to get something off my chest. If you are not in the mood for me self-absorbably indulging on my own weblog, feel free to scroll down to this outstanding post from WizardPC. Moving on…
I can deal with Lucky Gunner not inviting me to the last shoot they held – after all, I am a small fish in a surprisingly large pond here in Knoxville, and it probably honestly slipped their mind… if they were aware of me at all.
I can deal with Lucky Gunner not wanting to support my fundraiser for Ramon Castillo – after all, they are a business, and giving money away to any charitable cause that stumbles across their path is hardly a good way to make a profit.
I can deal with Lucky Gunner not permitting me to bring my father (coincidentally visiting from the NorthWet that weekend) to their upcoming Memorial Day Shoot – after all, it is their shindig, and if it is half as popular as it has seemed, they are going to have a full house regardless*.
I cannot deal with dishonesty. Three weeks back, M. D. Creekmore over at The Survivalist Blog announced a free ammunition give-away courtesy of Lucky Gunner, with the only requirements being to write a post about the relevant topic, link to both webpages, and email in your submission. Easy enough, right? Well, I did just that, and it turns out that JP and I were the only two entries (discovered by way of an IRC conversation and M.D.’s post). Hey, just one more entry, and we all go home happy, right?
Wrong. It turns out there were other entries, which already cast some not-insignificant doubt on Lucky Gunner’s claims. A week passed, with other folks claiming to have submitted entries before the deadline, and still no word from Lucky Gunner.
And yesterday we find out that Lucky Gunner chose their three winners out of six entries, with neither JP nor I winning. Now, this may sound like me just whining about not winning, and you are certainly welcome to think that, but I do find it more than a little… convenient… that no one who complained about the delay/situation walked away with a prize.
In the end, my conspiracy theories aside, were there two entries by the deadline, or were there not? Why did Lucky Gunner wait until six entries to declare the winners? If there were only two entries, why did those two people, and the first person to submit another entry, not win? Why did they ask for “at least one more entry”, and then wait for another four? And why did they wait until yesterday to announce the winners? Of all the ways to handle the contest, this is pretty damn near the top of the “Worst” list.
And if I cannot trust them to run something as stupid as an online contest, how can I trust them with my money? I cannot, and, as such, I will be refraining from doing business with them in the future, and have taken down their advertisements from this webpage – I certainly appreciate them as a local business, and they seem to have no shortage of enthusiasm for the shooting community, but their follow-through is… lacking.
(Note: None of this post is intended to cast aspersions on M. D. Creekmore or his rather useful site – he was merely the host for the contest, and from his comments, he was having trouble with them as well, but at least he was trying to straighten out the jacked-up situation.)
(* – Speaking of the Memorial Day Weekend Blogger Shoot, I will not be attending. As I obliquely mentioned, my parents will be driving down from Washington State to spend about a week with us over that weekend, and I had intended on taking my father out to the shoot, especially with him getting back into recreational shooting. However, since that is not going to be possible, I cannot, in good conscience, spend a day at the range by myself when they took 10 days out of their schedule just to drive out here to spend a week… and I cannot bring myself to take up a whole reservation at the Blogger Shoot if I am only going to spend a few hours there. I would ask that all of you out-of-towners coming to visit drop me a note and we can work out some kind of after-hour get-together [I know a few good restaurants in the area...], but, aside from that, just take lots of pictures!)
I entered… did not win.
I’ve never liked the ad model they use. “Give us a free ad on your blog and we’ll enter you in a free ammo drawing that you won’t win.”
Uh huh.
@ Gunmart: Before or after the deadline? If before, that is just another problem with Lucky Gunner’s … “accounting”.
@ alan: Hell, I have no problems using webspace to enter into some stupid contest I am not likely to win… it is not like I am using it for anything else. I have a problem with people lying, misrepresenting, or fumble-fingering that contest to the point where other folks rightfully believe they are lying.
You know where you’re loved, respected and read. I think I’ll go to work putting together a “we’re not the cool kids” shoot. If it comes to be, you can bring whomever you want. Why would I care? It’s a shoot, not high tea.
You tell me where and when, and if I can make it, I will.
In fairness, given that Lucky Gunner is providing the ammunition and firearms, I can see why they might want to limit attendance. On the flip (and more rational) side, simply pass down a rule that only media-types can use the LG ammo and firearms, and the media-types can bring guests so long as those guests are restricted to their own ammo and firearms.
Hell, my father just wanted to come and watch, but no. *shrug* As I said, it is their shindig, and I am sure it will do just fine without me.
[...] for out-of-towners 8 comments | 1913 23May11 | written by Linoge As previously mentioned, I will not be at the Lucky Gunner shoot this weekend, for a variety of reasons. I will, however, [...]
Linoge,
My name is Angela and I’m with Lucky Gunner- I just came across your post and wanted to respond to it.
I’m sorry you didn’t get an invite to the 50 cal shoot we put together a while back- it was honestly a last minute small get together but now that you are officially on my radar as a Knoxvillian I will make sure you get the heads up on any fun things we put together in the future.
Please send me your contact info privately so I can make sure to let you know the next time we have a get together- and I hope you will consider joining us.
You basically hit the nail on the head regarding your fundraiser- we have people asking us all the time about donations to various charities. We’d love to support them all but like you said we are a business and still a fairly new one, and we just don’t have the room in our budget at this time to take on donations to various charities.
Regarding the invitees for this weekend’s upcoming Blogger Shoot- as you know it is invite only for firearm industry bloggers, podcasters, and other (online) media folks (online magazines, press releases, radio shows, forums, informational websites, etc). You definitely fall into this group and we would have loved to have you sign up for the event. We fortunately but surprisingly has a ton more people than we expected, who also fall into this group of invitees, sign up for the weekend. We hoped to get about 40 people signed up- and that was the maximum amount of people our range location could hold. After we saw the amount of initial interest in the event, we knew there would be no way we could allow family to tag along. We ended up having to go back and ask to be able to bring more people to the range and we got the max lifted to 70 and we have already hit that max! Point being, your father is only 1 additional person but if we allowed him to come we would have everyone else asking and expecting for their family to be able to come as well (and believe me I have had multiple people ask) and we just honestly don’t have the room for anyone else at the event. We hope you understand.
The main part of your post I want to address is the recent contest on M.D. Creekmore’s site. The contest post was launched on February 23rd and we stated that we would randomly draw three winners from the qualifying entries on Wednesday March 9th. On March the 2nd, I noticed there were only 2 entries to the contest which isn’t normal given how responsive MD’s readers typically are. I alerted one of our team members, who is MD’s main contact and was coordinating the contest, about the low number of entries… but this team member was traveling throughout Europe at the time for the IWA conference. Due to his travels, he didn’t get a chance to email MD about the low entries until March 10 (a day after the contest was due to end) and proposed at that time that perhaps another post by MD would increase entries and that perhaps we should extend the contest cut-off date back a few days to allow for more participation. MD made the requested post and we ended up getting 21 entries total. All entries were numbered 1-21 and the 3 winners were chosen randomly by a random number generator like this one(http://www.random.org/) and announced to MD on March 14th- 4 days after the contest was supposed to end. To be clear, we were in no way being dishonest and I’m disappointed that it came across this way. I take fault in extending the contest, we should have just excepted the low number of entries and proceeded with the March 9th deadline we set forth from the beginning. Our actions were a result of us trying to get the most participation out of the contest combined with a small team, traveling, and some miscommunication on our end. In the future we will make sure to hold off on running any contests unless we have ample man power and time to manage them on our end.
Thanks for the feedback, we can always take constructive criticism and learn from it to make future promotions run more smoothly. As an aside, we have a dinner get together arranged for Friday night May 27th- it’s not an official event for the Blogger Shoot weekend and anyone can come even if they are not attending the shoot. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll pass the details along.
Thank you,
Angela
Gentlemen,
As I am the man who put on the Memorial Day BulletFest Shoot, I must disagree with your conclusions. Lucky Gunner reached deep and sponsored the shoot, and I limited the attendance for safety reasons. What began as a small gathering has become much larger than any of us imagined.
I regret that many of you were not able to attend, but you are not alone. I personally turned down many corporate offers and sponsor opportunities. Should the only motivation have been to make a profit I assure you both Lucky Gunner and I would not have spent what we did. Our goal was to support the Wounded Warrior Project, which we did to great effect. In large due to the efforts of Lucky Gunner.
Respectfully,
Benton Bryan
Man in Charge.
@ Angela:
Thank you for your response… Like I said, the first two items did not really concern me, so there is no real point in rehashing those.
However, regarding the third – your recent Memorial Day shoot – I am going to have to go back and retract my previous comments in light of new evidence. Now that people have had a chance to recover from the shoot, get home, and start uploading the pictures, I can finally lay eyes on what was going on, and I now completely realize that there was absolutely no reason why there could not be an “observation” area, or even designated “observers” mixed in with the “allowed to shoot our guns with our ammunition” people. Have them wear different shirts. Charge them admission. Keep them corralled to some area separate from he active fire line. Whatever. But given the size and scope of the field wherein this event transpired (for Heaven’s sake, the SWAT team showed up in their helicopter, and I know what kind of real-estate those need to be safely landed with us idiot, civilian, non-LEOs nearby), there was space – space that was (possibly facetiously) referred to as being “longer than Knob Creek”.
But no. This was not really about the shooting… no, this was about good SEO business (for some definition of “good”). This was about ensuring people went home and generated all the buzz possible about your company and your products. This was about bribing people to get them to boost your corporation’s standings on the search engines, since your normal methods seem to be encountering some difficulty in that arena.
Cannot say as though I blame you, really – who could resist being bribed by free ammunition and free fully-automatic firearms? Y’all are bound to be riding a “free” publicity wave for the next month, at the least. But, once again, oddly just like the Survivalist Blog contest, Lucky Gunner’s planning and follow-through was… shall we say “lacking”?
*shrug* In the end, my annoyance with your corporation is probably not going to matter in the slightest – my traffic is only a quarter Lucky Gunner’s, my pagerank is equivalent, and my yearly ammunition purchases are not exactly what I would quantify as “significant”. But you can rest assured that the Memorial Day shoot has convinced my father of what the Survivalist Blog contest convinced me – Lucky Gunner is not a company we will be doing business with. Y’all chose a great time to get into the ammunition business, and it seems to have worked out wonderfully for you, but that is a saturated market, and I trust other companies more than yours, whereas he was less-than-impressed with your rather elitist (but understandable, I suppose, given the purpose of the shoot) attitude regarding only allowing “actual” media types in.
And regarding that Survivalist Blog contest, I appreciate the explanation, but you will have to forgive me if I find it coming across significantly more as a long series of excuses… I once tried to feed a similar line to my Chief Engineering Officer, and, if anything, he only got more pissed off with me. In a similar vein, is it better to be considered untrustworthy or incompetent? And why should I give my money to a company that has show itself to be either one or the other? It is good that you know what y’all did wrong, and I sincerely hope that you can avoid similar problems in the future, but, suffice to say, the damage is done.
I appreciate your bringing some far-flung pro-rights webloggers into town so I had a chance to meet a scant few of them, I appreciate your feedback, and it was good to meet you at the Friday night dinner, but, honestly, do not worry about contacting me in the future in regards to any of your events. Every man has his price, and, in a rare exception for me, mine is higher than most… at least for Lucky Gunner.
@ Benton Bryan:
First, speaking as a veteran and son of a veteran, I would like to thank you for supporting the Wounded Warrior Project – it is, indeed, a worthy organization, and one that does massive amounts of good for our active service members.
Speaking more-generally, why was this collaboration with/for the Wounded Warrior Project not mentioned anywhere on the Lucky Gunner site? And now that the event is over, why is there no accounting of the money raised for that worthy organization? After all, they accounted for every round sent downrange… one would think they could count a few dollars.
That said, you will have to forgive me for being characteristically blunt, but reading comprehension is not one of your strong suits. As you can plainly see in the post to which you commented, I very clearly indicated that I did not hold y’all’s not permitting my father to come to your shoot against you; that has, of course, changed, as explained in my response to Angela, but at the time, that particular decision on your part did not affect my “conclusions” – namely, that I will not be doing business with Lucky Gunner in the future.
Moving on, it is more than a little insulting to both our intelligences for you to indicate that Lucky Gunner had no plans to make a profit out of this enterprise… If that were true, the governing board of that corporation is short-sighted indeed, but, thankfully, I am not – yes, Lucky Gunner probably forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars in ammunition, money for the tankers, food, water, and whatnot else, in addition to whatever amounts were donated to the WWP, but you and I both know that the word-of-mouth advertising will generate more traffic for their site, more business for their company, and more attention to their name… which is definitely one of Lucky Gunner’s overall goals.
Not that I blame them – businesses are in the business of making money, but at least I am honest enough to acknowledge that.
So, thank you for your comment, but, honestly, do not waste both our times. However, while you are here, perhaps you can answer a question of mine – how is it that Lucky Gunner’s and Ammo.net’s inventory listings are exactly identical? Is Lucky Gunner an actual corporation, or is it just a front for yet another wonderful drop-shipping conglomerate in the background?
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