Lidl On The Hook For $260K In Christmas Chicken Dinners After Twitter Campaign Goes Viral

Winner, winner, so very many chicken dinners for Lidl to hand out in Belgium.  The discount retailer is on the hook for about $260,000 worth of Christmas chicken dinners, after it offered to trade five four-course meals in exchange for every dedicated hash tag on Twitter. So this is either a resounding success or… or Lidl will not call it anything but a success.

On Monday, the supermarket chain launched a campaign to help the poor, saying it would give out five Christmas meals for every tweet that included the hash tag #luxevooriedereen, which is Dutch for “luxury for everyone,” reports Reuters.

The company said it had planned on only handing out around 1,000 of the dinner packs, which go for 20 euros each and contained  tomato soup, vol-au-vents with chips, an ice-cream cake and chocolates. But as the Internet loves to do, that scheme went viral,  and quick.

Newspapers wrote about the offer and by the time the 24 hours of the campaign had wound down, 1,500 people had tweeted out the hash tag. So that’s 7,500 chicken dinners. Yowza, right? Perhaps, but rather than get caught up and admit it wasn’t expecting such a success, Lidl rounded the number up to 10,000 dinners.

However, next year might be a different story, the company said, admitting it wasn’t sure if the campaign would happen again.

“We’ve learnt quite a few lessons over the past 48 hours, to say the least,” the spokesman said.

I’m just glad I got to write “winner, winner, chicken dinner” and have it actually relate to winning chicken dinners. Success!

Lidl Christmas dinner offer goes viral on Twitter [Reuters]

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