20th
On Restaurant.com
When Sam and I moved to San Francisco, up onto Telegraph Hill, I almost immediately checked Restaurant.com for some hyper-local deals. I fired up the site and did a search for all restaurants within one mile of our zip code, then cross-referenced those restaurants offering certificates with Yelp reviews. I immediately purchased certificates for the ten (or so) restaurants that had $25 certificates available and four stars or better on Yelp.
Now we’re in the process of settling into our new home in Chicago, and I decided I’d try to do the same thing. Immediately, however, I saw that I’d have to use some stricter criteria - our zip code here has nearly 200 restaurants on Restaurant.com, and about 70 of those have four stars or better on Yelp. I’m not about to buy 70 certificates - we’d never get through them all.
Trying to decide on some tougher criteria, I recalled our single bad experience trying to use a Restaurant.com certificate. It was for an Italian restaurant in North Beach who informed us that they were planning on discontinuing their acceptance of Restaurant.com certificates. Also, they pointed out, the terms of the certificate we’d purchased specified that it was only good on dinner entrees. While we thought (naively, perhaps) that this meant non-appetizer/salad items ordered during dinnertime, it actually meant one of the three items under the “entree” heading on their menu. Not one of their stunning-sounding pastas or risottos, none of the seasonal items, none of the specials (which were “specials” not due to reduced price, but rather due to availability at the chef’s whim). We determined that we didn’t want to order one of those three items, and so we ordered the risottos we wanted and resolved to call Restaurant.com and ask to exchange the certificate. Though the food was good, the bait-and-switch-y feel left a bad taste in our mouths, and we wish we’d ultimately just walked to another restaurant.
Another couple of certificates for other restaurants never got used - and we never set foot in those establishments - because they restricted certificate use to certain days of the week. Restaurant.com certificates routinely have a minimum expenditure attached (often a $35 minimum for a $25 certificate), and depending on the price range of the restaurant it can be difficult to hit that minimum with just the two of us eating. To hit minimums, we often used them to take out a friend, but that meant coordinating with friend schedules, and that often meant going on a peak day (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday). Restaurants in our San Francisco neighborhood also seemed fond of closing on Mondays and sometimes Tuesdays, so between the certificate restrictions and hours of operation, certificates were sometimes usable only two or three days a week.
I’m sure it’s easy to see how criteria fall out of these experiences. The 70 or so restaurants I started with dropped to about 30 when I eliminated all of the places that either restricted use days, or required purchase from specific parts of the menu, a certain number of diners, or a minimum purchase greater than $35. I still won’t buy certificates to all 30 - I want to maximize variety, so I’ll be culling categories that have a lot of restaurants. But the restaurants that have added a lot of requirements to their certificates have already been cut.
I understand that there are perfectly legitimate business reasons for adding some of these requirements to certificates. On weekends, a restaurant might have plenty of business already, and want to limit their diners to those paying full price. Some menu sections might be full of low-margin items that are labor-intensive to produce.
But as a diner, those business reasons have very little to do with me. They simply mean that my certificates are less likely to be usable on a night that I decide to try a new place, or that I’ll be faced with choices that as a restaurant owner, you don’t want me to be making. After all, don’t you want me trying the item that sounds the best to me - the one that (if it’s as good as it sounds) would have me coming back again and again?
So, to restaurants considering participating with the Restaurant.com certificate program: please, keep it simple. Don’t drive away potential customers (and, assuming your food is good, potential repeat customers) with severe limitations on certificate use. You might not make a ton of money off of me on my first trip, but you’ll be making it off me for a long time after.
