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Premiere Guild Raffles are not Randomly Selected
— July 10, 2007 Leave a Comment
The other day I posted on how the winner selection for the Premiere Guild raffle for the exclusive Commander Neyo bust was not random but was based on zip code. This was based on premiere guild members who won that reported on various Gentle Giant collectors forums and on auctions found on eBay.
More information has come to my attention that proves that the Premiere Guild raffles are not random at all but instead are based on criteria that changes with each raffle. This information comes from Gentle Giant itself from a comment left on the GG blog from GG employee Jewel. Here is her full comment left here.
On July 06, 2007 02:45 PM, Jewell Morson said…
Wow, 666 comments!
How the random selection works:
Each time the raffle selection process is run the system auto sorts and shuffles the entries at least 3 times then makes the selection of winners. This process is repeated until all winners have been selected. The sorting criterion varies each time a raffle is executed.
We have looked into the most recent raffles and the same process was used during the selection of the winners.
Just a reminder…
As we have stated before, the blog is available for our collectors to make comments, offer suggestions and even provide constructive criticism to Gentle Giant Ltd. However, this is not the forum to put down other blogger’s opinions or insult one another. Racial, sexist, derogatory and defaming comments made against other bloggers will not be tolerated. If this continues we will have to resort to deleting individual posts and if it persists, turning off comments all together. We will also address this situation on an individual basis.
Please contact customerservice@gentlegiantstudios.com directly, if you need additional information or if you have any questions
Thank you,
Jewell
Gentle Giant LTD
So according to Jewel, the raffle entries are sorted before they are chosen, by criteria that changes every raffle. I guess we now know that GG doesn’t understand the meaning of “random.” Just because entries were chosen randomly from a list that has been pre-sorted doesn’t mean the raffle was random. The fact that they are sorting the lists at all means that the selection process is NOT random.
In this case, the sorting criteria was zip code. So the list was sorted by zip code and entries were only selected from a group of zip codes that came from about 10 or so states all in the Northeast. Needless to say, even if GG thinks this is random, it was not fair to members who live throughout the rest of the country who entered. These members did not have a fair chance because they did not live in the selected zip codes.
Gentle Giant needs to do a few things here to correct the problem. First of all, what’s done is done. We can’t change the outcome of the Neyo raffle. So to ensure that there will be fewer problems in the future, I suggest that Gentle Giant not use the words “random” to describe these raffles, if indeed they are not random. In addition, Gentle Giant needs to ensure that whatever criteria they use to select winners, it needs to remain fair for all who enter. Ideally, the raffles should be totally random and not pre-sorted by any criteria.
But to really give the Premiere Guild members what they paid for, GG needs to get rid of the raffles altogether and give us what they promised which is access for all premiere guild members to all convention exclusives.
Full Disclosure: I am a Gentle Giant Premiere Guild member.
