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The Kansas City Royals had a promotion with Panera, the sandwich and bagel chain, which offered fans a free baker's dozen bagels whenever the Royals collected 13 hits in a win. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time -- I mean, how often will the Royals get 13 hits, let alone in a win?

So far, once, and as far as Panera is concerned, that's one time too many. After the Royals pulled off the feat on April 20, Panera decided enough was enough:

"We're definitely pulling the plug," said Eric Cole, vice president of operations for the Kansas City Panera franchises.

Cole said that Panera was overwhelmed when more than 8,500 fans wanted to redeem their ticket stubs from that victory. That meant that Panera's franchises were busy pumping out more than 111,000 bagels over a five-day period.

"It was just too much," Cole said. "We were led to believe that there would be about a 15 percent redemption rate, so we figured at most it would be 20 percent. I think it wound up being about 26.7 percent from that one game.

"It takes about six minutes to prepare a bagel the way we want to. So we just had situations where we couldn't do it at certain stores for the number of fans who wanted them."

Six minutes for each bagel? I'm assuming that's toasted and covered in schmear, but still, that seems like an awfully long time, especially when you consider there's a hole in the middle. Let's do some math: (8,500 fans) * (13 bagels) * (six minutes) = 663,000 minutes = 11,050 hours! Yeah, I'm not surprised they pulled the plug; maybe the money they divert from the marketing budget can now be applied to streamlining their food prep time.

(via Fark)