The Money Experiment – Restaurant.com
Recently, I got an email from my HR dept about a site called www.workingadvantage.com . It is a site that gives employees of a (subscribed) company discounts, incentives and deals on day to day things like food, travel, groceries etc. While browsing through their offers, I stumbled upon an offer by www.restaurant.com. Restaurant.com has a program called ‘Dinner-of-the-month’. The way it works is you buy a bunch of restaurant gift certificates at a discounted price and use one certificate every month at one of the restaurants featured on their site. They email one $25 certificate to you every month. You can sign up for 3, 6 or 12 month plans. Normally, these certificates go for $10 each. I paid $6 for a 3 month plan, which was effectively buying 3 $25 certificates for six bucks or $2 per pop. Not too bad a deal huh? Now you must be thinking how could that be possible. I was kinda skeptical too while signing up. Then I said, hell even if it doesn’t work, all I’d be losing was $6. So I sign up and in the next hour or so, I see a certificate in my inbox. Now we wanted to see what restaurants were on their list. And to my surprise, there were 100s of restaurants in Austin. After an hour of deliberation, we zeroed in on Clay Pit. I took a printout of the certificate and that same evening, we were on our way to the restaurant. We were a little concerned about the fineprint and sure enough there was a fineprint. We had to spend a minimum of $50 on food before we could redeem the certificate. Now Clay pit is a ‘contemporary’ Indian restaurant. What that means is it is pretty expensive compared to most Indian restaurants in Austin. Having said that, I must admit it is by far our most favorite one too. Long story short, we ended up with a bill of $75 that night. But came out happy paying only $50.
Money Scraped $25-$2 = $23