Mon 28 Aug 2006
I received one of those Adobe PDF flyers via email that instructs you to print it out and present it to the store as a coupon. This one says, “Try your coffee ICED. Stop by your neighborhood Starbucks Coffee between noon and 9pm for a complimentary iced grande beverage.” The fine print even had copyright information, 2006 Starbucks Company, and the language “All rights reserved. One Grande beverage per person per visit with this email. Please print and present this email to your Starbucks Barista. Offer good only at participating Starbucks Coffee locations. Expires September 30, 2006. Barista, please use discount code 113.”
Just to see if it works, Mr. W printed this flyer out and took it to a local Starbucks. The manager on shift came out and talked to us and yes, it is a scam. Someone spent some time copying/scanning an actual Starbucks flyer and made it into a PDF format coupon. Starbucks does not give promotions through email, ever. A real Starbucks promo would come through snail mail, it’d be a full-color ad, have a bar code on the bottom, and is usually printed on cardstock paper. Basically, she said, anything through email can be assumed to be unauthorized and fraudulent. But she honored the flyer anyway and gave Mr. W a grande iced chai tea, just this once, because we genuinely didn’t know that this was fake (at least, not for sure). Because customer service was so nice, that particular Starbucks has now earned another customer in Mr. W. He normally refused to pay for overpriced coffee except on the rarest of occasions, but now they’ve touched his overcaffeinated heart.
thanks for checking – i have always been under the impression that these things via email aren’t authentic.
Wow! That is cool that the manager honored the coupon any way. A good customer service is hard to find. I would write them a letter. Not often do you receive a letter of praise.
I know that my Red Lobster coupons are real (via email) because I signed up for them through their site… they send them out once a month. Also.. Pizza Hut sends theirs that way too.. so some of them are real. Who and WHY would someone take the time to do that and not benefit from it? Weird.
I think Borders has a print-out coupon, too. I’d think that the mass-produceable, transferable coupons give a percentage off, to give you incentive for BUYING their stuff. I can’t see that a coffee place would give out free coffee in unlimited quantities.
A friend of mine passed me a similar coupon about a free box of Haagan Dazs ice cream bars (Manufacturers Coupon) via email.
It looked authentic but I was quite sure it was bogus because they would never give the product away for free like that.
Funny enough though, she did try to use it at the store, and they actually gave it to her. I couldn’t believe it and told her it was still a bogus coupon.
When she tried it again, the store refused to accept it claiming it was a scam coupon! oops!
Too good to be true. Although the funny part is some people seem to be able to use them anyway!
Not a hoax afterall!
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/News/StarbucksYanksFreeCoffeeDeal.aspx
Hmm. Well, the article said it’d been modified, so maybe the version we got wasn’t legitimate. The Starbucks manager said clearly that legit Starbucks coupons should have a SKU (sp?) number on the bottom.