Olive Garden's $100 All-You-Can-Eat Pass All Gobbled Up

Olive Garden's $100 Never Ending Pasta Bowl offer ended pretty quick, as the restaurant chain sold out of the all-you-can-eat pasta and salad pass within hours, angering some customers but delighting the 1,000 people who got them.

The paucity of passes suggests the promotion was more about scoring publicity than building traffic in the chain's restaurants.

Olive Garden announced on its Facebook page that it was shutting down the promotion just hours after it started due to the high demand for the passes.


"(The Never Ending Pasta Bowl pass) was gone before you even opened it up," commented David Spiel on Facebook, expressing the sentiment of many others. "Understand there is a country trying for it. But if a purchase page comes up you should be able to purchase."

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Another commenter, David Lupowitz, agreed, saying he felt he was duped by the promotion.

"The Never Ending Pasta Bowl is something us Olive Garden fans look forward to every year and we are more than willing to come to the restaurant to purchase our meal under that promotion, but it stinks that Olive Garden would have the nerve to only make that $100 Pasta Pass available to a chosen few who were lucky enough to score one in time," Lupowitz wrote.

The Statesman Journal reported that only 1,000 Never Ending Pasta Bowl passes were sold nationwide, which allows holders to feast at the restaurant all-you-can-eat style over 49 days. The chain is doing the pasta pass in connection with its annual "Never Ending Pasta Bowl" promotion, Sept. 22 through Nov. 9, which lets folks eat all the pasta they want for $9.99, according to the newspaper.

"What we're trying to do is get some attention," says Jay Spenchian, executive vice president of marketing, per the Statesman Journal. "It's sure to provoke a reaction."

Some of the Olive Garden passes have already popped up on eBay for as much as $400, according to the Huffington Post, as some purchasers try to cash in on the demand along with Olive Garden selling so few of the passes.

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