Wal-Mart celebrates birthdays with free cupcakes

Everybody has a birthday — and a large subset of that demographic also seems to enjoy cupcakes.

Wal-Mart locations all over the country used the hours between noon and 4 p.m. Sunday to raise a sweet treat to all of the birthdays that will be celebrated over the course of the year.

The bakery at theBenner Pike Wal-Mart prepared 600 chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. Passers-by — and there were quite a few — also had a choice between whipped or buttercream frosting.

“You don’t get anything for free nowadays. You’ve got to take advantage of it,” Beth Thomas, a bakery employee, said.

Typically, Thomas spends her workdays making bread or decorating doughnuts, but on Sunday, she was the intermediary between the customers and their early/belated/right-on-time birthday gifts. She said that the bakery was able to crank out all 600 cupcakes over the course of a week, a small fraction of the 3 million that were distributed by Wal-Mart locations across the nation on Sunday.

“I think it just promotes a healthy relationship with our customers,” Thomas said.

This story was originally published March 12, 2017 at 4:11 PM with the headline "Wal-Mart celebrates birthdays with free cupcakes."