Today Starbucks withdrew their offer for free iced coffee. The offer was ridiculously generous:
“Stop by your neighborhood Starbucks Coffee between noon and 9 pm for a complimentary iced grande beverage. One Grande beverage per person per visit with this email. Please print and present this email to your Starbucks Barista…Expires September 30, 2006. Barista, please use discount code 113.”
That’s free iced coffee every day for over a month at any location. In San Francisco we have something like 300 Starbucks (OK, I exaggerate – it’s only 112), so I could have gotten an unlimited supply of iced coffees for the next month.
According to the article,
In a statement, Starbucks said the offer “has been redistributed beyond the original intent and modified beyond Starbucks’ control.”
That redistribution included me. The PDF coupon was emailed to just about everybody in my office and I expect that my office wasn’t the only one sending this thing around. For the record, I got my free iced coffee yesterday at my local Starbucks in San Francisco.
Definitely a candidate for the next edition of Business 2.0′s Dumbest Moments in Business.
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