Starbucks Retracts Free Iced Coffee Email After Offer Spread Across Internet   - 3,317 Views, 2 Comments

The Starbucks free iced coffee coupon was intended as a promotion for just the friends and family of a limited number of employees in the South Eastern United States, but it quickly grew out of control as it ended up being shared well beyond the region. Once posted to the popular Digg site, it got ‘dugg’ more than 1600 times, which generally means that just the one site which Digg pointed to probably received thousands of hits, all of them looking for that free coffee.

Said Starbucks in a public statement, “An email offering a free Starbucks iced coffee was distributed to a limited group of Starbucks partners (employees) in the Southeast United States on Wednesday, August 23, 2006, with instructions to forward to their group of friends and family. Unfortunately, it has been redistributed beyond the original intent and modified beyond Starbucks control. Effective immediately, this offer will no longer be valid at any Starbucks locations. We apologize for any confusion and inconvenience as a result of this offer.”

In an effort at damage control, the public statement was displayed prominently at Starbucks across the country this week, as you can see by the picture below.

There actually was such a thing as a free coffee, but no more:

Retraction hanging in the drive-through window at a California Starbucks:

Some sites are now slamming Starbucks for “not understanding how email works”, but sometimes the simple explanation and fix are the most obvious. In the future, perhaps Starbucks should print limitations right on their email coupons, such as limited to a certain region.