October 7th 2009 (gasp! today!) is Good Coffee Day at Starbucks. You can find the ad here.

This is part of Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ initiative where they want to do things that are good to each other and the planet. This includes the way they buy their coffee, to minimizing their environmental footprint, to being involved in local communities. I feel good each time I buy a cup from them because it means that I am part of it too.

And tomorrow, we can all be part of this great initiative as Starbucks will be giving away a complimentary tall cup of 100% responsibly grown, ethically traded brewed coffee. This give away will be only between 10am to 12pm at any Starbucks outlet and is only on 7th October 2009.

However, note that this is subjected to some T&Cs …

* Limited to one cup per customer

* Not exchangeable for cash or other products

* Valid at all Starbucks Coffee stores in Malaysia

So make a date with Starbucks tomorrow and be part of this Save The Earth initiative.

Hmm … wonder if they have a specific brew for us or is it up to us? I want my Caramel …

This is great. Besides having a cup of great coffee, you can now also treat your garden with it.

I was at KLCC’s Starbucks and came across this nice looking metal pail with some packs in it. Curious, I went over to pick it up and found that it was coffee grounds. Wow! Isn’t that great? To be able to recycle and give back to nature what it has given us.

Apparently by mixing coffee grounds into your soil will give your soil a higher nitrogen content. This, in turn will give you great looking plants, not to mention, great for the recycling effort too.

Hmm … when my garden is up, I will get these packs (and they are free) and dump it in my soil. What a great way to save on those fertilisers!

You can get this at the following Starbucks outlets:

• KLCC
• Pavilion
• Capital Square, KL
• Berjaya Times Square, KL
• The Gardens
• Borders Bookstore, The Gardens
• Plaza Mont Kiara
• SOHO KL
• IOI Mall, Puchong
• Jusco Bukit Tinggi, Klang
• Seremban Parade
• Ikano Power Centre
• Centrepoint, Bandar Utama
• Kota Damansara
• Giant Kelana Jaya, PJ
• Assunta Hospital, PJ
• Sunway Pyramid

Go grab one today and help the green effort too!

Happy Gardening!

Today we received an email which showed the above promotion. Without hesitation (and being a sucker for freebies), I quickly sms the above to 33365. Penny mentioned that the sms may cost money and I said that it is probably free since it is not mentioned in the ad above.

True enough when the mobile voucher came back to my phone, I was charged RM3.50!!! So, there we were, staring at the ridiculous rate that I was charged. Determine not to waste the charges, we went to order our drinks at the San Francisco outlet near our office. To our dismay, we saw this …

And we did not even need to waste RM3.50 for the sms!! We ended up buying the Extreme Mocha – which was on promo anyway!

When we check the website which was promoting this, it was not even stated that we needed to pay for the sms. Although it is not a lot of money, it is still money which is wasted, unless you are looking to buy drinks which are not part of the “Extremes” listed above!

Hmm … why do I feel a little cheated about this?

Today, I had the rare Friday morning to myself and I went over to KLCC for some breakfast at Starbucks. They were running the Breakfast Pairings which includes one sandwich and a daily brew for RM6.50. If you choose to have Latte, then you add RM3.00 for it.

I went to their outlet on the Ground Floor and after ordering, I was told that they had ran out of Sunny Egg Sandwich. This was before 10am on a weekday! I was not very happy with this since I had expected them to have more of these promo items.

I then went to their indoor outlet on the 3rd floor and thanfully, there were plenty. I ordered my Latte and paid RM3 more and then I settled down for my breakfast. Yummy!

But my first bite was a little disappointing. I had expected a warmed up sandwich would be soft, but this was nothing like that. In fact, it was a little rubbery and there was no tantalizing smell to it. All throughout, I felt a little cheated, I really had expected more, especially breakfast. It should not be spoilt by rubbery food.

The latte was as expected. Hot and aromatic. No disappointments there.

I was looking up Starbucks’ website to find a nice graphic and found the above. Only thing is that it is not RM3.20, it’s now RM6.50 and if not mistaken, only valid till 11am instead of 2pm. It could have been another promo, but then, why was the website not updated?

All in all, I would not say that I would purposely go back to Starbucks for this promotion of theirs. If at all, I would only go for my coffee. Let’s hope that that would not be a let down in the future!