Olive Garden's Pasta Pass Saga: How Did Twitter React?

Darden Restaurants, Inc.'s DRI Olive Garden appealed to the stomachs of pasta-lovers everywhere last week when it unveiled the "Never Ending Pasta Pass."

The passes, which allow users to eat unlimited pasta, breadsticks, soup, salad and Coca-Cola for the seven-week period between September 22 and November 9, cost $100 and were limited to 1,000 customers. They sold out within an hour.

That's understandable, given the size of Olive Garden's customer base -- it makes more than $3 billion in sales a year -- and the relative cheapness of the pass.

So what did social media users think of the deal? On Twitter, many were happy:

A few were even mad they didn't get a pass:

Others...not so much:

When the passes began selling on the secondary market for higher prices, that's when things really got crazy:

At least Olive Garden has turned it into a marketing opportunity:

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, the author had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.