Darin took Taco Bell up on its free Black Jack Taco Halloween promotion.

Before you get jealous because you forgot to take advantage of the ubiquitously advertised giveaway Saturday night, take a look at Darin’s picture and story:

I’m a long time reader of Consumerist and have enjoyed the many years of information posted to enable to consumer to fight back and be heard. So I figured today could be my day to send in a complaint about the wrong-doings of a local business.

After reading / seeing / hearing that Taco Bell would be giving out free Black Jack tacos on Halloween I decided to be the targeted customer and walk right into their media blitz of a promotion to score me a free taco. I went to my local [redacted], Ohio Taco Bell at around 8:00 (after dark as the commercial implied) only to be greeted with a fairly long wait (~30 minutes in drive-thru) but alas I expected a bit of this for free tacos. I make my order of over $20 worth of Taco goodness and was offered my free Black Jack tacos for as many people were in my car (2).

This is what I received. And seriously, I didn’t do anything but unwrap it and stare and what was supposed to be a taco.

Now I understand free is free but this is a shell with a single teaspoons worth of meat on it and scraps for the rest. I called the store back to simply ask if this was the “new normal” size for this promotion or if someone just decided to reduce the contents by 75%. The staff then refused to answer my question and placed me on hold where I waited for 20 minutes and gave up. I repeated the call roughly an hour later to the same treatment.

Hopefully other stores weren’t as bad as mine but I felt that this story was worth sharing to hope that someone may notice how I and surely many others from [redacted], Ohio were “treated” this Halloween.

This makes me all the happier I went with Chipotle’s free burrito promo on Halloween.

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