BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Discount retailer Lidl faces a
200,000-euro ($260,000) Christmas dinner bill after an offer of
chicken vol-au-vents and ice cream cake for the poor went
viral.
The supermarket launched a Twitter campaign in Belgium on Monday,
saying it would hand out five four-course Christmas dinners to food
banks for each tweet on a hash tag.
Lidl had expected to hand out about 1,000 of the 20-euro dinner
packs, consisting of tomato soup, vol-au-vents with chips, an
ice-cream cake and chocolates, a spokesman for the German-based
company's Belgium unit said on Wednesday.
But local newspapers wrote about the offer and people retweeted
using the hash tag - #luxevooriedereen, Dutch for "luxury for
everyone".
By the end of the 24-hour campaign, 1,500 people had tweeted,
meaning Lidl has to deliver 7,500 dinners. That sparked reports the
supermarket had been caught out by its campaign.
To quash such talk, Lidl rounded up the number of dinners to
10,000, and branded the campaign a success.
Lidl said it had not yet decided whether to repeat the exercise
next year.
"We've learnt quite a few lessons over the past 48 hours, to say
the least," the spokesman said.
($1 = 0.7693 euros)