Starbucks to offer free pastries
It's looking to be a good spring for Canadian coffee lovers.
This week, Starbucks announced that on March 23, it will offer Canadian customers free pastries between opening time and 10:30 a.m. local time or until pastries run out.
"It's an opportunity to surprise and delight our customers — and, hopefully, get a few new ones," said Kathleen Cook, category manager for Starbucks Canada.
She said the company's food sales have been "steady."
The pastries will be given to anyone who has a printed coupon or a coupon displayed on a hand-held device. The coupon can be downloaded on the Starbucks.ca website, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.
The move comes just over a week after McDonald's wrapped up a similar promotional campaign, in which it gave away free coffee — even to non-paying customers. The promotion ran for the two weeks following the Olympics and coincided with the popular Roll Up the Rim contest at the Tim Hortons doughnut shop chain.
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That promotion, which involves rolling up the rim of a coffee cup to see whether a prize has been won, began on March 1, 2010. It ends when specially marked coffee cups run out.
Cook says the pastry give-away is only one in a line of successful promotions launched by the coffee retailer.
"We've done a lot of promotions in the past," she said. "There's an opportunity in the marketplace for everybody."