Cellfire Mobile Coupons

Michael (Admin) | Aug 2, 2008 Lifestyle

User rating:

(6 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)

Loading ...

Cellfire Mobile Coupons is a great idea. Consumers get to save money, retailers get more business, and Cellfire gets advertising revenue. Hey wait, isn’t that the same idea behind every coupon mailer you’ve ever gotten in your mailbox? You know what I mean… the mailers that contain 50 coupons, only one or two of which you might use in the unlikely event that you actually want or need that service anytime in the near future if their storefront is conveniently located near your home?

I think you know where I’m going with this. Cellfire is basically a coupon mailer on your iPhone. The deals are sometimes local, sometimes not, and so far all of the offers are pretty useless to me. Case in point: I live in Chicago. This town must have thousands of pizza places, and I mean that quite literally. THOUSANDS. Yet the only pizza deal Cellfire offers is for a chain called Taylor St. Pizza whose nearest location is about 30 miles away. Huh? This is the third largest city in the US of A, and I think most would concede that it’s among the top pizza markets in the country… we have our very own “Chicago Style Pizza” for crying out loud… yet the best Cellfire Mobile Coupons can do is hawk a deal that would cost more in gas than it would save on the bottom line! Muy bad. Muy muy bad.

Pizza aside, most of the other Cellfire offers (as of now) are even more generic even though I installed the app a couple weeks ago: Sears Portrait Studio (yawn), 1-800-FLOWERS (they run 5 zillion coupons a day), Hollywood Video (Blockbuster’s ugly little sister), Petoskey Area Northern Michigan (pfffffft!). The offer from Peet’s Coffee & Tea isn’t bad (2-for-1 Freddos, whatever that is) and omg there’s actually a Peet’s near me! Alas, this is a matter of sheer coincidence since there are only two Peet’s locations within 25 miles of where I live – I checked Peet’s website.

The one offer I did choose to redeem was a free song download from EMI Music. I only had one chance to see the download code (it was blocked after I viewed and exited) so I went to the website, put in the code, and spent the next hour trying to find something I liked in their unbelievably limited music “catalog”. In the end I guess free is free, but if the exercise of finding a decent free download was supposed to show off EMI’s rep as a music source, I’d have to label that mission with a big red FAIL! Sorry EMI, but we both know that the song selection available to Cellfire users is crap. Do you have more in the vault for other non-promo users? I have no idea, and I don’t really care.

Bottom line: Cellfire Mobile Coupons, in its current form, is largely a waste of time unless you live within spitting distance of Taylor St. Pizza, Peet’s Coffee, Hollywood Video, or Petoskey, MI. Sure, go get your free song from BMI if you can find one you don’t hate, but other than that my guess is that you’ll find the offers completely useless. This could certainly change over time as Cellfire inks more deals with more national retailers, but for now all I can say is (insert farting noise here).