There are few pleasures in life greater than a big, hot bowl of noodles slathered in sauce. And while relatively cheap and easy to make at home, there’s something profound about going out to eat and tucking into such a bowl made by someone else, preceded by an overdressed salad and unlimited greasy sticks of buttery garlic bread, and concluded with you not having to do the dishes. For some, this is a rare treat. Others might be inclined to indulge in this pleasure monthly, or weekly, or even daily.
For those passionate about pasta, Olive Garden has the Never-Ending Pasta Pass, a ticket to 13 straight weeks of unlimited pasta, salad or soup, and breadsticks. Or at least, it had the Pasta Pass. Olive Garden had 10,000 of these for sale, for $100 apiece, for like…less than a minute. It doesn’t have them anymore. They are already gone.
The Never-Ending Pasta Pass is a bizarre, mythical coupon that Olive Garden started selling in 2014. Made available annually, it entitles the bearer to unlimited pasta, salad or soup, and breadsticks from any Olive Garden for a set period of time: in this case, 13 weeks, starting on August 24. Olive Garden sold these once per year up through 2019, but it stopped in 2020 for, uh, reasons. The Pasta Pass is back today for the first time in six years, and it was slurped up so fast that many of its most devoted fans completely missed out.
I opened the link for the Pasta Pass at 11:01 a.m. PT, exactly one minute after it had gone live, and was met with this message:
400,000 ahead of me?! There are 10,000 Pasta Passes. This is not happening. Not that I was actually going to buy one. But if I had wanted to, it would have certainly been impossible.
Over on the Olive Garden subreddit (yes, that exists), everyone’s pretty bummed out! There’s one person I’m watching closely who says they started at 8,000 in line ahead of them, saw it drop down to 6,000, and just a few minutes ago 500, so I’m cheering for u/Im_Action to get this on behalf of everyone else. Others are reporting 20,000, 60,000, 100,000 in line ahead of them: impossible. I did see one user claiming they got one because they “used a bot,” and they are being roundly chastised by everyone else.
Here’s another lucky individual who obtained one:
As I write this, the Pasta Pass has just officially “sold out” after a little less than an hour. But technically, it’s been sold out pretty much since the first minute. If you weren’t one of the first people to click on the link milliseconds after it went live, you were stuck behind tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, leaving you with absolutely no chance of getting the pass. No pasta for you.
Is this all admittedly quite silly? Yeah. A Pasta Pass can actually be a great deal if you’re truly committed to using it. For those who might have $100 to throw down, this can be a great way to eat cheaply for several months running. Still, you’d have to eat at Olive Garden roughly around once a week for most of that period in order for the cost to even out, and as good as carbs doused in garlic butter can be, it seems like it might be a bit much. But I respect the game of those who want to try, and feel bad for all the everyday Olive Garden fans for whom this experience just roundly sucked. Like, really? We’re botting for noodles now? Even maybe scalping them? Because while technically you shouldn’t be able to scalp a Pasta Pass, as servers are meant to check ID when you use it, I cannot fathom every server does this every time, and I’m sure we’ll see some Pasta Passes popping up on resell sites in the coming days, if for no other reason than people being unable to help themselves.
So there’s yet another limited-supply thing on the internet ruined by botters. Cool system we’ve got going here.
