HOUSTON – (CBS HOUSTON) Houston furniture giant Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale has lost his third promotion related to sports in 10 months and will be refunding customers who bought more than $6,300 in furniture at one of his Gallery Furniture stores before the Houston Astros Season began. McIngvale offered a promotion for one weekend that allowed customers to buy the allotted amount of merchandise from his store and get a refund if the Astros won 63 games this season. The Astros had lost 100 games three straight years before 2014. On Sunday they beat the Oakland A’s 4-3 for their 63rd win of the season.
That will cause McIngvale to refund a lot of money to some very happy customers.
“About $4.2MM,” McIngvale told SportsRadio 610 on the amount he is returning. “It’s exciting. We’re in the customer business. Nothing makes customers happier than winning a promotion like this. It’s good to give back money to customers and they become customers for life.”
McIngvale did two football promotions, one for the NFC and AFC Championship games and one for the Super Bowl, which saw him refund $8 million to customers.
“This year I’m 0-3 and it will be over $12mm [in refunds],” Matress Mack said. “It’s a big number for me. It’s a scary number every night when I come home, my wife gives me the evil eye.”
McIngvale says he was rooting for the Astros to get to 63 wins, despite having so much money riding on them losing 100 games for the fourth straight year.
“I wasn’t betting against them. I was betting for,” Mack said. “I have been told by some of the people close to the Astros they’d probably win 70 games with all their exciting new players. So we put the number at 63 hoping the Astros would go over it, and they certainly went over it. So it was a great promotion to make customers happy and congratulations to the Astros. A giant percentage increase this year versus last year and I’m sure they’ll increase exponentially next year.”
Despite the success of the promotion for getting customers for life and making so many happy customers, McIngvale says that the likelihood of another promotion like this in the near future is slim.
“I’ll probably have divorce papers as soon as I do it again, so I’m done for a while. No Nothing for football, just going to sell furniture, delight customers and move on.”
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