Starbucks free pastry offer update.

SBUX pastry update: so last week, I posted an offer for today where you buy a coffee at Starbucks before 10:30 am and get a pastry free. Like many corporate freebie offers, that's sort of true and sort of not.

I went to a Starbucks in our office lobby, which is a fairly tiny location and usually not that busy. They had some pastries in their case, but told us that they had received a special box of promotion pastries for the free offer, and once that was gone, they weren't honoring the coupon (although it wasn't yet 10:30). We went up the street to the 4th & Seneca location, where they had long since run out of their free pastries, but had decided to honor the coupon and just give away everything in their pastry case until it was empty rather than enrage coupon-holding customers.

In conclusion, it probably would have been better if Starbucks had phrased it "Free pastries to the first 100 customers" or whatever, so it wouldn't seem so misleading for customers who held up their end of the bargain and got denied. These corporate marketing wizards, they never learn...