Here are our tips for saving money every day at popular chain restaurants. Some of these deals are rarely publicized yet you can take advantage of them every day if you just know what to ask for.
Here are the best restaurant deals we know of for the upcoming week. Plan your meals out for the best day of the week for a discount. Invite a friend along for any twofer or BOGO deals, or bring an extra home to enjoy later. Learn about dollar menus and happy hour deals that can help you save on dining out every day.
Eating out at a restaurant can fit in your budget when you take advantage of all these free and cheap food deals available this week. Teresa Mears is a website publisher, writer, blogger and editor who was raised to be frugal. In her 35 years as a journalist, she has written for papers ranging in size from the weekly Portland Tenn.
Leader to The Los Angeles Times. She was an editor for the Miami Herald for more than 17 years, overseeing coverage of home, real estate, family and other subjects. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News and other publications. Teresa owns and operates Miami On The Cheap , Florida On The Cheap , Fort Lauderdale On The Cheap , Palm Beach On The Cheap and Orlando On The Cheap.
Local on the Cheap sites. Join 8, cheapskates and get our free daily newsletter, filled with valuable advice to help you live better on less. Atlanta on the Cheap. Charlotte on the Cheap. Chicago on the Cheap. Columbus on the Cheap. Mile High Denver on the Cheap.
Hawaii on the Cheap. Kansas City on the Cheap. Vegas Living on the Cheap. Madison on the Cheap. Myrtle Beach on the Cheap. Orlando on the Cheap. Phoenix on the Cheap. Portland Living on the Cheap. RVA on the Cheap. Greater Seattle on the Cheap.
Triangle on the Cheap. South Florida on the Cheap. Southern Maine on the Cheap. All Our Cities. Skip to primary navigation Skip to secondary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer. When done correctly, Happy Hour ticket prices often average out higher than lunch tickets.
The key is being strategic about the food you offer in addition to the drinks. If you run a more upscale restaurant, try offering scaled-down versions of your dinner menu at an enticing price point while keeping drink prices close to retail. While BOGO buy one, get one free offers tend to be associated more with fast and casual restaurants, they can be used effectively by virtually any restaurant.
The restaurant now has 2, people to reach out to with additional offers, AND a large chunk of those customers are very likely to return. The reach you get from offering a compelling promotion goes far beyond the actual people who walk in and redeem the deal. These menus and any little freebies or specials you attach with them make for an evergreen source of promotion as well.
Check out this great example from Shake Shack:. Free appetizer campaigns are another type of promotion that work really well for our Owner. com partners but require a bit more effort and intentionality.
The key is finding a menu item that has a low cost and brings in a high margin — think chips and queso, fried pickles, fried onions, mozzarella sticks, salads, desserts, breadsticks, egg rolls, etc.
If you can find something that can be given away sustainably, that allows you to consider the campaign for an ongoing promotion. You can also limit the quantity of the free items given out, creating urgency to take advantage of the offer before it runs out.
Business card giveaways are an old strategy, but just like many of the strategies in this category, they remain effective today. The process is simple: offer customers a chance to win a free meal in exchange for dropping their business card in a bowl.
Make the prize a free meal for TWO and then advertise that you select a new card from the bowl every single week. We want as many cards as possible because our modern twist takes advantage of every card we get.
Family-sized meals have been a staple tool in the fast and fast-casual eatery toolbox for decades, but this concept remains underutilized elsewhere on the restaurant spectrum.
As we talked about earlier, people care a lot about the experience of eating out, and that experience is often deeply connected to the people they are eating out with. When a person sees a meal-for-two-offer, they think about sharing that meal with someone they know.
Offering shareable meals and preset, multi-course menus for specific group sizes is a great way to get people thinking about the experience they want to create and envisioning themselves having a great time with people they love at your restaurant.
Offering samples is a great way to drive sales. According to The Atlantic, free samples at stores like Costco can help boost sales considerably.
If you have one or two dishes that always score big with customers, have a staff member outside the restaurant offering bite-sized samples to passersby. If someone is in the mood for Indian food, they are usually going to choose their favorite Indian place.
Your real competitors have the same or similar cuisine, the same or similar mood appeal, and the same or similar location. Local ingredients, foods, and craft drinks tend to be more expensive, but they also tend to be very well received by local customers.
Choosing local suppliers, loudly advertising that fact, and collaborating with them provides a great focal point for ongoing promotion. If you are already sourcing local ingredients, foods, or drinks, reach out to the supplier and invite them to collaborate.
Pro tip: it will be a lot easier to set something up if you have a clear game plan to propose from the beginning. In addition to non-competing restaurants, there are tons of non-competing local businesses in your area that would love to cross-promote with you in order to mutually grow both businesses.
One creative idea is to partner with businesses and organizations that need meeting space during your non-service or even low-service hours. This gets people in the door who will likely be interested in coming back later to try your food.
You could also arrange to serve food to the group as part of the agreement, either as a promotion or a paid service. The point here is to be conscious of your assets and how you can use those assets to grab attention to your core business.
Despite all that focus on non-competing businesses, sometimes it even makes sense to partner with your direct competitors. Restaurant Week and similar local events are a great time to put competition aside and celebrate all the restaurants in your local area. Restaurant Weeks are very popular and tend to get coverage from both social media and local media.
Hand out flyers, offer discounts, and encourage people to come in and try a dish made by the people in their own community. If your restaurant is a great place to work, the entire service staff network in your city, plus all their friends and family, is going to know about it.
Get your staff involved in providing ideas for improving the restaurant, and then use those ideas. Offer individual and team bonuses when possible. Be conscientious with scheduling and allow added flexibility for longtime performers.
If you want to really go above and beyond, find out what would be personally meaningful to your top staff and try to give them that as best you can. Holidays can be a massive source of new business, but they also bring their fair share of competition. Every restaurant in your area is going to be running promotions and specials to compete for that holiday dining dash.
This is a day to pull out all the stops and celebrate someone incredibly important and special. You want to offer a great experience and charge a price that makes this an incredibly successful day for your restaurant. This phrase is intentionally vague but entails a limitless supply of alcohol.
Mimosas or wine are great options here, where you can supply a large amount of drinks at a relatively low budget. Instead of ignoring this or trying to fight it, why not profit from it? Create a ready-to-grill, take-home package that people can order to make their cookout easier AND higher quality at the same time.
You can even offer to grill it yourself for people who want the cookout experience without needing to do any work. The demographic for this celebration tends to skew a bit younger, however, and while diners are willing to spend money, cost is still a consideration. A prix fixe menu is the perfect fit for this holiday.
It lets your customers receive an upscale experience while also providing a fixed price they can commit to before arriving at your restaurant.
Offer upsells like wine pairing, main course upgrades, or special desserts to increase your average ticket size and make more money from the big spenders who visit your restaurant.
Reach out to as many as you can and find one that is interested in collaborating with you. Look for a mutually beneficial collaboration that is going to help both businesses grow together, and make sure both companies are contributing to the promotion and being featured in any advertising you both run for the event.
Customers love the convenience of simply showing up and experiencing the menu without needing to make wine decisions at each course. Start by choosing two or three signature dishes and then choose either one glass of wine or one bottle that best compliments the food. For example, your menu might offer three glasses of champagne, as well as a description of what dish they go with and why they pair well together.
Those who celebrate it tend to do so with the entire family, and you can encourage families with children to choose your restaurant on Easter by providing them with a special, kid-friendly menu that is intentional rather than an afterthought.
The key here is to go a step beyond the normal kids fair of chicken fingers, fries, burgers, and pizza. Offer something exceptional but still accessible to young kids and then advertise it heavily leading up to the event.
This is an especially great promotion option for restaurants looking to attract families year-round. Halloween is all about fun. Halloween events are more about decoration than anything else. You can do the same types of events you would do other times of the year, like trivia, karaoke, contests, and more — as long as you really put some effort into the décor.
You can also do stuff like menu item puns, random candies, fall-themed desserts, and so much more. If there is ever a holiday to just go nuts and have some fun, this is the one. The best way to tap into this demand is to roll out a little in-restaurant Irish pub of your own.
Thanksgiving is a celebration of gratitude, and for many, a time to think about those less fortunate. People want to give back, and you can help them do just that with a Buy-One-Give-One promotion.
This is similar to a BOGO offer, but instead of providing customers with a free meal with each purchase, that purchase results in your restaurant donating a meal to those in need, usually through a partnership with a local charity.
Everybody likes gifts, especially around Christmas time. Offering a free gift during the month of December is a great way to tap into that Christmas energy. You can offer a free appetizer.
You can give away branded merchandise like Christmas-tree ornaments or cheap t-shirts. Or you can do something really simple like giving away a free item or two along with a connected purchase. The idea here is to offer something low-cost to everyone. You can run a single-winner giveaway with a more noteworthy price any time.
For Christmas, you want it to feel more like a gift than sweepstakes. One of the best ways to create regulars is to have a weekly special they love, look forward to, and show up for week in and week out. Prizes can include anything from free drinks to gift cards to branded t-shirts or whatever you have available.
The night can also be enhanced with other types of games or anything that creates a game-like or carnival-like atmosphere. When you offer freebies as a one-off promotion to get people in the door, you are planning to recoup that cost through repeat orders at full price or at a minor discount where you are still bringing in a profit.
You want to be strategic about the loss leader item and make sure it depends on additional orders to be enjoyed. Craft beer is appreciated by a wide variety of people and can be paired with a wide variety of foods, making for a fun and interesting weekly experience.
To make your beer night special, choose a different selection of beers each week and include a description of why you chose it. Another great addition is to provide branded mugs or glasses customers can order. Challenges that are nearly impossible are more spectacular and more likely to grab viral attention.
Pair these with a notable prize. Challenges that are accessible are more fun and more likely to create regulars. Offer smaller prizes most people are capable of winning. Live entertainment can take many different forms. The key here is to measure performance and either tie entertainer compensation to sales or make sure the bump in customers is justifying the expense.
Trivia night combines a lot of what people like about game nights with what they love about live entertainment. Trivia nights are great at pulling in regulars and can often appeal to a higher spending crowd than other types of activities.
Some ideas to make these nights extra special include doing rotating themes, offering food and drink prizes for winners and runners up, and offering small discounts to all active participants.
Remember to use these nights to promote new menu items, specials occurring on other days, and anything else that could use some extra eyeballs. Given these nights are often presold and can be created in bulk, you are typically able to offer these at a compelling price point, further increasing the draw and encouraging customers to come back on a regular basis.
This type of weekly special is also a great opportunity to bring in guest chefs offering unique menus. The more variety you can provide from week to week, the more likely you are to get regulars.
Designating a weekly night where a percentage of profits go to a specific charity allows you to attract customers, give back to your community, and support great causes at the same time.
While this will likely work better as a monthly event for some restaurants, depending on your location and clientele, this could make for the perfect weekly event. You might even consider trying a hybrid class, where you combine a light cooking lesson with a more typical dining experience, giving patrons the best of both worlds.
Maybe even pair it with a more standard promotion offer. BOGO offers are generally perceived as a better offer than a percentage discount or even a free appetizer, so assuming you only offer this deal on Customer Appreciation Night, it will end up feeling like… actual customer appreciation.
Regulars are the backbone of your business. The trick with creating a great loyalty program is to find something that coaxes more people from occasional purchases to frequent purchases without losing all your margins along the way.
We want to get people in the club as quickly and easily as possible, and then make them reach for the biggest rewards. A great way to do this is to use email or text signup as your entry point to the membership.
Take promotional events you would otherwise simply offer the general public and make them member-only, BUT all people need to do to become a member is simply signup via their email or phone number.
You can apply this concept to the rest of the ideas in this category and really any of the ideas in this guide. Consider which promotions to run for all customers and which to attach to membership, motivating more people to sign up.
The power of a point system is in its simplicity. A lot of restaurants using a point system forget to tell their customers exactly how it works or help them track their points, which ultimately defeats the purpose of having the system in the first place.
We have a point-based system built directly into our Owner. com platform, and it will automatically send out emails just like this to your customers after each purchase.
We want to incentivize our most frequent patrons to spread the word about our restaurant and even bring people in with them. If you are using a point system, set it up so successful referrals result in a big point bonus you email the customer about and make a point of celebrating.
We want to make that experience feel really great. We want to motivate that patron to continue referring people to our restaurant.
If you are offering any sort of the exclusive VIP rewards we talk about elsewhere on this list, make referrals a key entry point to the top rewards. People love getting a behind-the-scenes look at the places they frequent, and restaurants are no exception. This is especially true for foodies, who already love learning about the origins of different foods, as well as how to prepare them.
A great way to reward your loyal patrons and engage your local foodie community is to host recurring Behind-the-Scenes Tour nights, where you can introduce customers to your history, tell them how you prepare some of your most popular dishes, and give them an idea of what it takes to run your restaurant on a daily basis.
If you have an open kitchen, let people watch from nearby tables so they can see their meals being prepared. This is also the perfect promotional opportunity for cross-promoting with other businesses looking to get their names out there, like local farmers or specialty goods producers you partner with.
Consider inviting these partners along on your tour nights so customers can learn more about their offerings as well.
Rotating local partners into the event will also keep it interesting for customers who want to return multiple times. Having your customers tag you on social media while visiting your restaurant is a great way to get exposure to new customers.
A few times a week, randomly pick a customer who has tagged you and surprise their table with free drinks or a free dessert. Either way, this is a great strategy to get exposure to new customers AND create loyal customers who are eager to return to your restaurant again.
This one is less about an offer you run and more about how you present your brand. You can also take photos of your customers and add them to the walls. This sort of deeper engagement is an important part of creating real loyalty from your customers that goes beyond the food they are purchasing.
Just like a popup allows you to experiment with creating a new experience, you can achieve something similar while also building customer loyalty by holding exclusive dining events for members.
The goal here is to create special, exclusive experiences people rave about and look forward to attending. If you have a smaller customer base, try what we talked about earlier and attach these events to the lowest membership tier, where anyone who signs up via email or phone number can join the fun.
Quarterly or bi-yearly events are the perfect VIP bonus for outstanding patrons. And I can promise you they would LOVE to weigh-in and have some influence on the direction of that menu.
Providing opportunities for customers to interact with and influence your business is both a great promotion tool and a great way to build loyalty. If you already use limited-run menu items as a promotion tool — which I highly recommend — this becomes really easy and even systematic.
You can periodically take previously run items and invite your customers to vote on what to bring back. Attach this to the entry level of your loyalty program to motivate more people to signup, but only if you are doing it periodically.
It might even be somethin retro like fondue. Then you can put a poll on social media and ask your customers to vote for their favorite dish from yesteryear. This is a great way to get some online word-of-mouth marketing, and customers will feel more emotionally connected to your business after having the chance to influence a real, tangible decision you make for the restaurant.
The vast majority of promotions you will run depend on the customer expecting them. The promotion only works when you create the expectation to then motivate an action by the customer.
This was the original reason we built Owner. com, which allows restaurants to do commission-free deliveries through their website, while still using 3rd party driver networks. But whether you are using Owner.
com or have set up direct-orders on your website via another method, getting people to actually use your website instead of the third party apps can be tricky. When a new restaurant partner starts with us, we design and print out 1, fliers for them to package in deliveries prepared for 3rd party app orders.
These fliers offer a discount to the recipient that can only be redeemed via the direct-order system.
The meal has to be right around $5. 2. We're looking for the best food the joint offers on a budget. It's not about the most food you can get 1. "Utilizing the apps for fast food restaurants can go a long way in saving you money. · 2. "Go for the days they have deals! · 3. "Get a kid's Restaurant & Food Delivery Deals Near You: Save today with our great takeout & restaurant deals. Check Groupon first & book online for fast delivery
Nikosar 
