Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/05/06/get-100-worth-of-restaurant-com-gift-card-credit-for-18.html
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search your area, find all the various discount offers happening in your city
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Does anyone know how this works?
If I buy a $100 credit for $18, and use that $100 credit to buy $250 worth of gift cards, and I go to the restaurant and spend that $25 gift card - does the restaurant make $25, $10, or nothin?
Because my bet is closer to the nothing, and I don’t want to screw the restaurants any more; they have already had a bad year.
But if this is a thing where some Venture Capitalists are throwing money at a start up and I can transfer that money to restaurants that need help, then I might be in…
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So the last time I used Restaurant.com for a certificate, which my mom gave to me out of pure kindness, was beyond frustrating.
I live in a rather busy suburban area, with hundreds of restaurants within a 20 minute drive. I think I found like 6 that were around me. The conditions for redemption were really ridiculous, with a needed spend like 3x the value of the cert, and I had to provide personal info, etc etc. Overall, wasn’t worth it. And the restaurant hated it.
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So they are a scam, selling coupons. (And the restaurant gets nothing but “exposure”…)
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So basically this is the entertainment coupon books that used to be sold in paper form as school fundraisers, but now they are limiting the maximum savings to $100 in an effort to convince people that the savings are a gift card
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I used to live on coupon books. Mostly Chinook Book, which has decent selection criteria and a local focus. But there was a period where Marqeta was trying to get retail/restaurant customers so they decided the best way to get people to use its double-your-value debit-ish card was to give “big spenders” money to spend. I qualified by spending $100 in a month (getting at least $200 worth of product at places I’d be shopping anyways), and for each month I spent $100, they credited me with $100. And spending that $100 got me another month of $100. In other words, perpetual money machine!
I got to be very good at:
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using it for groceries rather than restaurants, and
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making my bill come out exactly $101 so I wasn’t putting out any of my own money and maximizing the doubling effect of the card.
Good while it lasted, until they pivoted to shut down the whole card offering some months later (perhaps I wasn’t the only one optimizing for my model rather than theirs).
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Restaurant coupon books are often made available at the local level, and you’re much better off going that way than with a dotcom.
“Here’s how it works — you buy this $100 gift card to Restaurant.com for just $18. Then, you go to the Restaurant.com website, search your area”
NO. First, go to Restaurant.com and search your area.
Then, if you find anything remotely palatable, read through the insane terms and conditions to use any kind of coupon.
I’ve bought coupon books in the past, and I’ve used Restaurant.com. It’s worse than Groupon. They can sell $25 certs for $3 because you just won’t go to the trouble of using them.
My mom was awarded a $100 cert a year ago and still hasn’t found a way to use it. You need to be so dedicated to jumping through the hoops so that it works for you. Prepare to be ultra flexible!
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seems legit
this is exactly what i did. nothing. a handful of uninteresting restaurants in my entire state.
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I took a look at a few deals on the restaurant.com site. They required spending of 2-3x the certificate’s value at the restaurant.
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