3 ms·

Ask HN: Anybody else get ripped off via “Free Tea Friday” at Starbucks today?

6 points by masonic 9y ago

All week, Starbucks here advertised a "Free Tea Friday" promo for their new Iced Tea Infusion drinks -- free from 1PM - 2PM today. Well, the local Starbucks was slammed, with a 20+ minute wait in line and who-knows-how-long at the drive-thru. Anyway, when our order was rung up, we were being charged full price for the "free" tea. Turns out that the register time had slipped into 2:00 (and not even 2:01!) and "free" became silently un-free. All of us who got in line less than 22 minutes or so early got left out. Stores apparently can't override this. I can't imagine that the cost-of-goods for this (pennies per drink) would warrant alienating SO many people. We abandoned our order altogether and went to Peet's instead, and I personally will never buy that particular item.

dangrossman 9y ago
Why is this on HN?
- masonic 9y ago
  In general, it's a poor technological implementation for such promos to be implemented as a hard clock-time boundary with no workaround whatsoever at the user level. There's a broad design issue to be considered here, for retail and elsewhere.