Starbucks retracts their free iced coffee offer

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.

Snakes on a Plane – personalized message

OK, this might be the coolest marketing idea ever. It’s a personalized message about the upcoming Snakes on a Plane movie in the voice of Samuel Jackson. It will actually dial the phone number of the recipient and he will address them by their name, mention their job, how they look, what kind of car, they drive, etc.

Scary Technorati graph

Here’s a scary graph on Technorati. This shows a huge increase in blog
posts mentioning “World War III“.

Battle on Wikipedia over Marina Girl definition

A couple of months ago, I posted something about a couple of funny definitions of the Marina Girl and Marina Guy on Wikipedia. Well, I was trying to show this to someone today and I saw that someone has taken the liberty of deleting the definitions. I checked out the Wikipedia change log for this entry and noticed that there has been quite a battle going on with people deleting the definitions and other people adding them back in. Come on people, can’t we just agree to keep the definitions in place? On a related note, as I was going through the change log I noticed a definition for the “Marina Child”:

If the denizens of the Marina do not fall into the category above (single), they are married and possess one child. The Marina child is less than 5 years of age and often responds to such names as “Cole”, “Spencer”, “Madison” or “Dakota”. Last names as first names or geographical locations to which either Marina parent has never been are currently all the rage. The Marina child can be found on any weekend morning being pushed or carried by either parent down Chestnut or Union Streets.

Photo by Flickr user Thomas Hawk