Cheesecake Factory’s Free Cheesecake Promotion Was A Total Disaster

If you’ve ever wondered whether or not America loves cheesecake, here’s some solid proof. In order to celebrate their 40th anniversary, The Cheesecake Factory gave out 40,000 slices of free cheesecake to fans. And while most of the locations didn’t have any issues, the ones that did made it very clear why sometimes, we can’t have nice things.

There’ve been a lot of promotions that have run amok recently. Remember the Build-A-Bear “Pay Your Age” promo that lead to a lot of unhappy customers? The Cheesecake Factory deal takes the, erm, cake (sorry) for the most destruction, as police and ambulances were called.

Here’s one of the reasons why things got so messy. The Cheesecake Factory is one of the vendors for DoorDash, meaning that a driver can pick up the order for you. And since this promo didn’t really have any limitations, people were quick to order their cheesecake online and wait at home for it. Wouldn’t you? But this led to a lot of orders happening at once, and a lot of drivers who had to stand around for hours based on the amount of chaos.

In fact, someone took a video of an arrest being made while plenty of cheesecake fans were nervously waiting for an order.

@DoorDash @ARLnowDOTcom @Cheesecake @washingtonpost @dcexaminer over 2hrs wait for delivery drivers,cars got ticketed,ppl got arrested n profanities thrown at the poor employees. Not worth getting injured over $6,jerks. pic.twitter.com/QovOL76QjX

— p p (@pat_patsy_cake) December 5, 2018

When you know it all happened thanks to free cheesecake, it’ll make you cringe. But here’s the worst part — things like this really do happen more than you think.

@DoorDash @ARLnowDOTcom@Cheesecake @washingtonpost@dcexaminer avoid this place like a plague. Over 2hrs wait to pickup a free 🧀🍰. Fight broke out,ppl getting ticketed n arrested. Of course ppl got impatient after a long time. Very disorganized n total chaos. pic.twitter.com/uJznxDHg23

— p p (@pat_patsy_cake) December 5, 2018

Reporter Byron Tau, who has covered real riots in the news, said that the scariest day for him was when he worked at a Cheesecake Factory and they were running a somewhat similar promotion.

That led others who work in restaurants and retail to share their own harrowing accounts of customers losing their cool due to a sale or giveaway.

I used to work at a Old Navy in Massachusetts and for me it was the day we had a $1 flip flop promotion, I saw a pregnant lady get punched and the thing is it didn't even phase her...she shock it off and ran towards the wall of flip flops with the rest of the horde.

— Rachael Lynn (@kodachrome99) December 5, 2018

Hardee's introduced their fried chicken on Mother's Day and gave it away for free. Working the chicken station that day was the worst day of my life.

— TRon SwansonBarker (@Wojakgivesback) December 6, 2018

Maybe we can all learn from this. While free cheesecake is a wonderful thing, it’s not worth getting into an actual fight over.