It’s the holiday season. This means it’s time for the annual “Starbucks for Life” contest promotion. It’s like the McDonald Monopoly promotion except employees can’t steal all of the hard-to-find game pieces themselves.
Instead, you earn “plays” by making purchases at Starbucks, by earning bonus plays by meeting certain challenges, or by redeeming your two “free plays” a day required by any contest that says “No purchase necessary.”
To show how uninterested I was in this year’s contest, it ends on 1/3/2022 and I hadn’t bothered to sign in to the website. I got tired of seeing the emails from Starbucks, broke down and clicked the link.
After signing in and collecting my challenge prizes, I had a decent number of plays.
Surely I could win one of the prizes, or at least an instant win prize, with 27 plays.
Here are the prizes offered.
It was only 10 plays in when I’d already filled in 2 of 3 spots of the top three rewards. Great! So I only have to hit the 1 in a million chance to get the rare third piece.
Instead, I kept getting repeats of those same pieces. Eventually, I earned three duplicates. This is supposed to earn me an extra play but that didn’t happen (more on this later.)
Eventually, I did win something.
10 stars. Yippee.
I reached the end of my plays with another trifecta of duplicate pieces and yet again no extra play. I looked for someone to complain to when I found the email link to HelloWorld.
If you’ve ever dealt with promotions before, you know that HelloWorld is one of the worst companies anywhere. Their websites are notoriously glitchy and if you have a legitimate complaint, they’ll review it and not give you any recourse. I stopped dealing with them when I didn’t receive the entries to an IHG promo where I had to send index cards to get entries and only received 75% of the entries I deserved. Their reply was “too bad, maybe you made a mistake on those entries.”
I Tweeted to Starbucks because maybe they’ll make good for a sponsored promotion when I know the people running it don’t give a spit. I don’t expect to win based on my 5 lost entries but maybe I would have won another 10 stars.
Remind me not to spend the 15 minutes “shaking a snowglobe” for entries when all I’ll get is 10 stars and a case of heartburn worse than I get from drinking their coffee.
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