UPDATE: Maybe You Can’t Celebrate 1st Day Of Spring With Free Cone

A free ice cream cone to start Spring? Yes. Maybe because March has been a lot colder than February, the idea of celebrating the first day of Spring just sounds so much better. UPDATE: It looks like some local Dairy Queen restaurants are NOT participating in the FREE Ice Cream Cone promotion. It turns out Kalamazoo locations are not, while the Battle Creek location says they are.

Participating Dairy Queen restaurants  will be offering up free ice cream cones on Tuesday, March 20th. It's the first day of Spring.

Dairy Queen has done this for the past three years. There's not too many things as sure to put a smile on your face as an ice cream cone. The ground rules are, there's no purchase necessary but there's a limit of one free cone per person.

And while you don't have to buy anything, this is a fund raiser for the Children's Miracle Network, so you might want to dig into your pocket or purse and make a donation. (The Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids is one of their hospitals)

According to Dairy Queen's website, the Battle Creek store is at 283 Main Street and the outside of Kalamazoo, the closest in in Grandville, at 63700 Rivertown Pkwy.

One thing needs to be said. It seems at the very least, a bit lazy, and at worst, disingenuous, to simply slap a "at participating locations only" disclaimer on your website. Depending on individual franchise agreements, franchisees  are not required to do all promotions. That being said, Dairy Queen is a national brand, and they can't be ignorant or naive that a promotion like this is going to get a lot of attention and bring in a fair amount of traffic to individual locations, especially in cold weather climates. It seems like they could do a better job of letting people know if a franchisee is not participating in a major promotion.

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