Panda Express Survey Validation Codes and Completion Rate

Summary

Panda Express has issued over 82,000 free entree codes to survey participants as of this writing (February 2009). They issue about 1500 per day. (A list of codes is here and the survey is here: http://pandaexpress.com/survey)

Update: It now seems that they have wrapped around and are reusing previously-issued numbers. As of February 2010, codes in the 20,600 range are being issued. It seems likely they started over from 10,000 when they reached 99,999 to keep the numbers short and easy to write down.

See a list of codes and the dates issued

Methodology

Panda Express, a chain of Chinese fast-food restaurants, issues coupons for a free entree item that require completion of a survey. Recently after completing a couple of surveys, I noticed that the validation codes were quite close. Given that the codes were entered about 15 minutes apart, it seems that the codes are simply increasing integer indices of the completed survey (1 for the first completed survey, 2 for the second, and so forth).

Thus we can determine that if 15 minutes elapsed, and if the survey indices were different by 32, then about 2 people per minute are completing the surveys. (Assuming a constant completion rate.)

At 2 people per minute, that works out to 60 * 24 * 2 = 2,880 survey completions per day. That's probably a little high, since people probably fill out fewer surveys in the middle of the night or in the morning. So figure about 1500 surveys are completed per day.

Last modified on 21 Jul 2011 by AO