In late May I was contacted by a reader who had made the finals of Jackson Hewitt’s “Win Win with the Big Check” video contest.  He said that he and the other finalists had been waiting for weeks and weeks to find out who had won and he was worried that JH wasn’t going to pay out the promised prize of two, $10,000 checks.  Jackson Hewitt had recently declared bankruptcy and suddenly the rules for the contest disappeared from the web and the folks at JH stopped responding to the finalists’ calls and e-mail.  On May 30th I did a post about Jackson Hewitt’s failure to pick a winner in this contest.  One of the finalists sent the story to Jackson Hewitt and in just a few hours, the company announced the would reveal the winner on June 9th.  And that’s just what they did.  .

So all’s well that ends well, right?  Not exactly.  Last week, before the winners were announced I got some angry comments from someone who claimed to be one of the winners in this contest.  She told me the checks had been cashed and that I was just being “pissy” and a sore loser because I didn’t win.  Of course, I didn’t actually enter this contest so I had no stake in the outcome.  I was just reporting some Video Contest News.

When the results were announced, Jackson Hewitt posted of the winners receiving their checks.  I wanted to see if the name on one of the checks matched the person who sent me the angry comment.  It did, but when I zoomed in, I noticed something else:

The winners got their giant checks on May 20th.  That was 9 whole days before I did my post saying Jackson Hewitt had failed to pick a winner in this contest!  Man do I feel like a jerk!

But wait a minute…to get all those people together for the photo I bet the winners were notified sometime in mid-May. So why the heck did Jackson Hewitt keep the news secret for a whole month?  By delaying the announcement, Jackson Hewitt let the 19 other finalists think they still had a shot at winning for about 5 weeks!  That sucks, man!  Why did they let those people hold out hope for so long?  And when Jackson Hewitt announced they would reveal the winner on June 9th, they already knew who won.  So why did they have to wait until June 9th to make the announcement?

If I hadn’t done a post about it, I don’t think they ever would have announced that a winner had been chosen.  The only explanation I can think of is that Jackson Hewitt was trying to keep the results quiet because of their bankruptcy.  The winners recived their check on May 20th and on May 23rd Jackson Hewitt filed for Chapter 11 protection.  I guess you can’t announce both of those pieces of news on the same day.   Someone at the company must have realized that the people they owed money to might get upset if they discovered JH had enough cash to pay out contest prizes but not enough to pay their rent.  So that’s probably why they put off announcing the winner until June 9th.  They had to wait for some of the sting of the bankruptcy announcement to wear off.  I guess that’s understandable but the whole thing was handled pretty badly.  If you’re holding a video contest you should at least have the decency to tell the non-winners that a winner has been picked so they can get on with their lives.  But from what I’ve been told, Jackson Hewitt has still not bothered to let the other finalists know the contest is over!  I guess JH is just assuming they’ll find out the bad news next time they check the contest page for updates.  And that’s a really uncool move.  I’m sure things are pretty crazy over at Jackson Hewitt’s HQ these days but that’s no excuse not to treat their contestants with the respect they deserve.

UPDATE: A very astute reader suggested an explanation that should have been obvious to me; What if Jackson Hewitt just back-dated the giant check to 3 days before the company went bankrupt?  It just seems far-fetched that they’d pick a winner in early May and then wait a month before announcing the results.  The company declared bankruptcy on May 23rd and the checks say May 20th on them.  I just checked and may 23rd was a monday.  So those checks were dated to the last business day before JH went bankrupt.