
Ask HN: Anybody else get ripped off via “Free Tea Friday” at Starbucks today? - masonic
All week, Starbucks here advertised a &quot;Free Tea Friday&quot; promo for their new Iced Tea Infusion drinks -- free from 1PM - 2PM today.<p>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 &quot;free&quot; tea.  Turns out that the register time had slipped into 2:00 (and not even 2:01!) and &quot;free&quot; became <i>silently</i> un-free.<p>All of us who got in line less than 22 minutes or so early got left out.  Stores apparently can&#x27;t override this.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine that the cost-of-goods for this (<i>pennies</i> per drink) would warrant alienating SO many people.  We abandoned our order altogether and went to Peet&#x27;s instead, and I personally will never buy that particular item.
======
dangrossman
Why is this on HN?

~~~
masonic
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.

