Everyone loves a deal. Getting something for less than its advertised price is the grease that regularly lubricates the wheels of commerce and is the unfortunate reality most service industry workers have found themselves beholden to. In our bargain-seeking way of life, quality is often replaced by how further we can barter down something that’s already being offered on the cheap.
Because restaurants aren’t in the business of losing money, they’ve found it necessary to adapt to this coupon reality in order to survive. Here then is a partial list of the ways many culinary institutions have had to resort in order to keep their doors open when the discount warriors come knocking.
Host a banquet event. Corporate restaurant banquet coordinators are similar to televangelists – the miracles they promise often come with hidden price tags, and the only healing going on is usually to their bottom lines. The one thing bar mitzvah’s, baby’s first birthdays, weddings, pharmaceutical sales meetings and Christmas parties all have in common is that they all begin with the signing of a carefully crafted fine-print contract. In addition to the standard you break it you bought it clauses found in most of these agreements, many restaurants now pad their coffers with things like mandatory sales minimums, guaranteed guest counts (regardless of how many people actually show up) and hefty cancellation penalties. But the piece de resistance hidden within any well-designed banquet function contract is the event fee. This “fee” is usually 20% of the pre-tax event total and is cloaked as an administrative cost retained for the set up and administration functions related to the event. Whatever the hell that means. It is not a gratuity and no part of it goes to the service staff. What it is is free money the company extorts from its “guests” for no other reason than it can to inflate its monthly P&L statements. In addition, you will also be reminded at the end of your event that a gratuity is not included in the total and is completely optional and at your discretion – so feel free to add on another 20% on top of what you previously agreed upon unless you want to be looked upon as a cheap ass. So the next time your special occasion rolls around on the calendar, you’d do well to accurately consider the full cost your celebrating will entail before signing on the dotted line.
Order the house wine. It’s no mystery that alcohol is the largest profit generator in any restaurant. Most restaurants aim for anywhere between a 20 – 30% liquor cost, which means they have a built-in incentive to sell you that second martini you’re straddling the fence about. And when it comes to fattening the cash cow nothing screams all aboard the gravy train like wine, as industry-wide markups average two and a half to three times wholesale cost. However, some budget-conscious consumers periodically find it a little problematic paying $60 for the same bottle they’re accustomed to shelling out $20 for at the corner liquor store. Enter: on-premise wine. On-premise wine is juice that is made available solely to restaurants by distributors – usually at a bargain basement price – that consumers have no familiarity with. These wines are then used by restaurants – primarily in banquets and happy hour programs – to prop up and enhance their margins while convincing their customers that they’re actually getting in on a great deal. Mostly produced from fruit that doesn’t quite make the premium label grade, it’s usually just palatable enough to pass at the cut-rate price point at which its offered. So consider that the next time you’re savoring your $6 glass of chardonnay that was purchased by the restaurant for $3 a bottle.
Buy into the scratch kitchen mentality. One of the latest trends that has been pooped out by the bowels of corporate restaurant chain marketing departments is to tout their food as being produced in “scratch kitchens.” Today cooking from true scratch is a fallacy, so restaurants have reinvented the word to suit their own merchandising means – because in modern society life without processed food is a virtual impossibility. And that isn’t to naively suggest that all processed foods are bad, either. If all processed food were suddenly removed from our dietary chain, it would certainly be interesting to see how many of us could survive and for how long. After all, where would we get our food while trusting it to be both safe and nutritious? So the problem isn’t the processed food as much as labeling it as something that it isn’t. What is being touted as scratch cuisine – and the often elevated pricetag that accompanies it – is primarily pre-packaged Sysco product that ends up reconfigured to meet corporate recipe specifications. Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it is worth considering when the lasagna sitting in front of you that the menu described as lovingly designed by the hands of master chefs was in reality assembled by Jose and Juan during their prep shift after thawing out some frozen meat and popping open a few cans of processed tomato sauce. So the next time you visit a restaurant that touts its menu as emerging from a scratch kitchen, you may want to get an itch to eat somewhere else.
Get your feature on. Corporate restaurant marketing departments exist for one singular reason – to continually devise creative promotions which will ultimately benefit the company while simultaneously fooling their patrons into thinking they’re getting a good deal in the process. In the brave new world of culinary carnival barking, what used to be known as the Daily Chef’s Special is now lovingly referred to as Our Monthly Features. But as with most restaurant doublespeak, the lipstick may have changed but the pig it’s applied to remains the same. Corporate menu feature programs are designed by kitchen managers masquerading as chefs with the sole intent of leveraging their buying power with regional suppliers to concoct profitable menu selections that can readily be nationally marketed to the average mediocre palate. However, these “chefs” are to culinary originality the same way Martha Stewart’s Kmart furniture line belongs in the Guggenheim Museum. So the next time you’re at dinner and your server is pushing the monthly features down your throat, keep in mind he or she is being strong-armed behind the scenes to meet corporate-mandated quotas that are usually not to your advantage to buy…into.
Don’t verify the auto grat. Tipping is both the bane and lifeblood of the restaurant industry. The reason why your halibut doesn’t cost twice what you’re paying is because the average tipped wage in the United States hovers somewhere around good luck having a life. Which means that while the federal minimum wage currently equals $7.25 per hour, federal law permits employers to pay tipped workers a base wage of only $2.13 per hour, provided that tips make up the difference. Restaurants essentially rely on the generosity of their patrons to subsidize a majority of their payrolls in order to keep their costs down while maintaining their supposed thin margins. However, this system has also succeeded in creating a culture whereby hospitality workers are forced to pass the hat for their wages while relying on the dubious whims and arithmetic skills of those they serve. In order to prevent their service staffs from all-out mutiny, many restauranteurs mandate an automatic gratuity on parties of a certain size to guarantee that their help is adequately compensated on the largest bills and will subsequently return to work the following day. But many servers – being the forgetful folk they can sometimes be – often fail to point out that the service charge was already included on the check, hoping the person who is paying is too caught up in the moment to realize and will leave an additional tip on top of what is already being charged. This is a practice known as double-bagging among servers. So the next time it’s your turn to pay, take the extra moment to verify exactly what it is you’re paying for or you may find yourself coerced into generosity you never quite intended.
Holidays are a time for giving. Your money away, that is. Restaurant spending doubled on Christmas Day 2015 compared to the prior year, according to Sarah Quinlan, senior vice president of market insights for MasterCard Advisors. “It looks like we didn’t go to Grandma’s house this year,” Quinlan told Business Insider. “Nobody cooked. You can really see this trend of experiential spending. Consumers would much rather create a memory now than buy stuff.” Holidays are windfalls for restaurants, helping to compensate for the other comp and coupon driven days in between them. Most restaurants forego anything resembling discounting during holidays, opting instead for specialty menus with elevated pricing and select items with built-in inflated margins. The busiest holidays in the restaurant industry, in order, are Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, New Years Eve and Easter. So the next time you feel obligated to take dear ol’ mom out on her special day, make sure you invite a few of your Uncle Benjamins along for the party as well.
Restaurant Week really is weak. Restaurant Week is an annual marketing scam devised to lure suckers into thinking they can patronize a restaurant on the cheap which they normally couldn’t afford. The three course meal you’ve been coerced into sampling at a fraction of the usual price is also a fraction of a meal. Successful restaurant kitchens operate on a 30 – 35% food cost ratio, which means that for a $25 meal, cost should be less than $8.75 – and the ingredients will certainly reflect that math. Restaurants during Restaurant Week are like casinos in that they don’t remain in business by giving the majority of their profits away, but they do offer the illusionary promise of a jackpot to those willing to buy into the dream. Restaurant Week patrons are, more often than not, treated to a sampling of undersized portions concocted with subpar ingredients by chefs who would rather be stabbing themselves in the eye with a fork than dumbing down their menus for people they’ll likely never see again. The waitstaff is also not a fan of this annual frugal fest, as the one-and-done clientele it attracts are characteristically viewed as gratuity penny pinchers in addition to menu bargain hunters. All in all, you’d be getting a much better deal by regularly patronizing your neighborhood bar or restaurant during their normal happy hour than by participating in this annual miserly menagerie. So the next time Restaurant Week comes calling, you’d be better off letting it go straight to voice mail rather than listening to some hukster on the other end trying to sell you a bargain that is anything but.
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