Groupon’s Presidents Day Gaffe a Viral Hit
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Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Online discount site Groupon is grabbing headlines for incorrectly honoring Alexander Hamilton in a holiday promotion for Presidents Day.
On Friday, the publicly-traded company issued a press release providing details for a Presidents Day weekend discount of $10 off a $40 purchase from a local business. Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, never served as President.
“The $10 bill, as everyone knows, features President Alexander Hamilton – undeniably one of our greatest presidents and most widely recognized for establishing the country’s financial system,” the release states.
The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment over whether the press release was a publicity stunt.
Groupon is known for a quirky sense of humor in their marketing. On the day before Thanksgiving, the company distributed a press release last year announcing that they would remain open on Thanksgiving Day “because it’s a website,” while other brick-and-mortar stores battled with employees over holiday openings.
That release featured a fictitious spokesperson, “Barnicus Stapleton, Groupon’s Director of Website Openness and author of the pamphlet, <Tag, You’re It> A Child’s Guide to HTML Coding.”
Just as the Groupon “cat” mascot shares prosaic narratives to describe various deals, the Presidents Day release also puts words into “President Hamilton’s” mouth:
“Beginning Saturday, Feb. 15 at 9 am CST, shoppers will be able to redeem this offer by using the promo code “10OFF40LOCAL”, which isn’t very catchy, but neither was President Hamilton’s famous saying, ‘nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.’”
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