It’s Olive Garden’s Never Ending Pasta Pass Day!

Photo credit: Krista, CC BY 2.0. — and yes, this is Olive Garden pasta.

I’m running this post a little early, and this tweet should explain why:

Today. Is. The. Day. Our #pastapass goes on sale at 2pm ET, so we hope you’re ready for your chance at unlimited pasta. Good luck! 🎉 https://t.co/Oj9M52aZ4j pic.twitter.com/DZlZpeCNEE

— Olive Garden (@olivegarden) August 23, 2018

Yes, it’s Olive Garden’s annual Never Ending Pasta Pass sale! They have 23,000 eight-week Never Ending Pasta Passes available for $100 each, and 1,000 year-long Never Ending Pasta Passes available for $300.

I know some of you are thinking “you couldn’t pay me to eat that much Olive Garden pasta” and the rest of you are thinking “where do I sign up?” (This post is mostly for the second group. It’s also not sponsored by Olive Garden. I just find the whole thing fascinating.) If you want your shot at never-ending pasta, go to PastaPass.com a little before 2 p.m. Eastern so you can click the Buy Button EXACTLY AT 2, because these passes sell out in less than a second.

Which makes sense, when you do the math. An Olive Garden Create Your Own Pasta Bowl costs $9.99, so if you got the eight-week pasta pass, you’d only need to visit Olive Garden once a week for six weeks and then twice a week for two weeks to eat $100 in pasta. If there’s an Olive Garden near your office, for example, and you have an actual lunch break — because this pasta can only be ordered for here, not to go — you could enjoy pasta every day and save a lot of money on work lunches.

But can you in fact enjoy pasta every day? Slate interviewed Julia Laughlin, who was gifted a Never Ending Pasta Pass in 2016, and the answer (at least in this case) is yes:

I would say if you get free pasta for a month you want to get the most out of it that you can, preferably go multiple times a day, every day. I mean it was a free pasta pass for a “never-ending pasta bowl” so you could get as much as you wanted.

[…]

After 10 years of being like, can I go to Olive Garden every single weekend of my life, I’m not sick of it yet.

So. Who’s going to try to sign up?

Also, because it’s Throwback Thursday, I have to remind y’all of Caity Weaver’s classic “endless food” essay: My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers.

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