By Sunday night, the warehouse had run out of tape.
“Not boxes,” Priya said into the phone. “Tape.”
At home in Seattle, founder Jonah Mercer stared at the sales dashboard. His company, HavenDesk, sold ergonomic home-office furniture online. After three weak months, Jonah had approved the largest promotion in company history: 35 percent off everything for seventy-two hours.
Orders tripled.
Jonah had opened champagne.
Priya Shah, his operations manager, had opened the warehouse.
“We cannot ship this volume by Wednesday,” she said. “Maybe not by Friday.”
“But we finally have demand.”
“We have promises.”
The discount had spread beyond their email list after a popular deal account shared it. Customers ordered faster than inventory forecasts anticipated. Several desks were already oversold.
Marketing wanted to extend the promotion because acquisition costs had fallen dramatically.
Priya wanted it stopped immediately.
Jonah hesitated. Investors had spent months asking for growth. Ending a successful campaign felt absurd.
He extended it six hours.
Those six hours generated 1,140 additional orders.
They also produced the worst customer-service week in HavenDesk’s history.
Deliveries arrived late. Some buyers received cancellation notices. Refund requests increased. Social media filled with screenshots of unanswered messages.
Revenue for the month set a company record. Profit did not. Overtime, expedited freight, refunds, and discounts offered to angry customers consumed much of the gain.
At the next management meeting, Jonah wrote one sentence on the whiteboard:
Can operations survive what marketing promises?
Nobody mentioned the champagne.
Six months later, HavenDesk ran another major promotion—smaller discount, limited quantities, staggered emails.
Sales were lower.
Complaints were almost nonexistent.
Jonah found himself strangely relieved when the website traffic graph failed to break any records.
He had finally learned to distrust the kind of success that required everyone else in the company to apologize for it.
The Coupon Problem
