Dairy Queen App Review

The Dairy Queen app runs a promotion where patrons can collect “spoons” through participating stores to exchange for free food. But many of the small, locally owned stores do not participate, making this app a waste of time and space. Only check out if you live in a large, metropolis area.

The homepage of the Dairy Queen app says to “Check-in every visit. Open the app at participating myDQ app locations and ask the cashier for your reward spoon when ordering.” These aren’t literal spoons. Patrons can earn 1 spoon for every purchase at participating locations. Collecting five or ten spoons could unlock free DQ food or treats. This sounds like a nice piece of marketing genius and dictates that patrons will use the app at every visit. However, from reading through some of the comments about this app, it seems like very few franchised stores are actually “participating” and this is just wasting a lot of time for a lot of (now very frustrated) people.

For example, when I tried to sign up, I typed in my zip code. We have at least three Dairy Queens in a small radius, but none of them are participating in the app’s promotions. I was able to continue and log in with Facebook, but I understand the other comments. Why have systems in place to give away freebies if there is no one participating in the promotion? I suppose this has to do with the fact that many Dairy Queens are independently owned, but I agree that it is a frustrating promotion if I can’t get anything out of it.

Just for fun, I typed in a much larger city that is about an hour away from where I live, and a number of participating Dairy Queens popped up. So this app may be more geared for people living in metropolis areas.

The app kept going dark on me very quickly. If I looked away from it for the slightest moment it would shut down and require that I reswiped my phone to open it. Once I figured out how to log in, I discovered a limited amount of things to do on my app. Basically it keeps a record of my spoons earned (zero, because I don’t have a local participating store) and because I have no spoons, I have no coupons available. Otherwise I can order, pay, or find a participating store (all of which are no use to me). Overall very disappointing.