Steal a Promotion, Steal Taco Bell’s Thunder
There has been much talk about the free advertising Taco Bell got for its Steal a Base, Steal a Taco promotion. Estimates are that the taco purveyor got a whopping $8 million worth of free advertising during the World Series. Now that Jacoby Ellsbury and the rest of America have eaten their free tacos, another pseudo-Mexican chain is hopping on the bandwagon.
The Qdoba Mexican Grill, the slightly upmarket Taco Bell, has started its own World Series-related promotion. A friend of Boston Daily got this email from the company:
SOX SWEEP, Celebrate with Qdoba!
Sox win, you win. Bring a Series ticket stub into any Qdoba
location to redeem your FREE TACO.Offer expires 11/11/07. Come into any Qdoba and present a
ticket stub from one of the Series games and you receive a
free taco of your choice. No purchase necessary.
Not only have our stomachs barely recovered from Tuesday’s free taco, but we’re kind of insulted by this promotion. The Taco Bell promotion was truly democratic. Everyone in America got a taco. During such a tumultuous period in our nation’s history, for three hours on an October day we could all unite around free food won for us by a man of Native American decent. The sheer idyllic patriotism of it all gets us misty.
But Qdoba just allows the rich to get richer. We certainly didn’t get World Series tickets. Hell, even some of the state’s most powerful people couldn’t scrounge up the coveted ducats. Does Qdoba really believe that people who had a few grand kicking around to drop on seats for the Fall Classic are going to line up to collect a free taco worth about a buck? That seems unlikely.
Nice try, Qdoba. But either all of America should get a free taco, or no one should get a free taco. It’s what the Founding Fathers would have wanted.