Restaurant.com is running an 80% off coupon through the end of September, 2009.  The coupon code is CHEF.

I think largely that people are happy with the deals that they get through Restaurant.com.  I’ve used the service, and I’ve been quite happy as well.  But to avoid any misunderstandings this time around, I’ll play the skeptic and try to explain as many caveats as I can so that you can see the other side of the plate.

• Restaurant.com dining certificates are more like coupons than gift certificates. Dining certificates may be applied to your meal purchase at participating restaurants, but only if the restaurant’s restrictions are met.
• There are usually restrictions on redeeming the dining certificates. These may include one or more of the following:
  • Minimum purchase amount
  • Minimum number of entrees
  • Exclusion of certain purchases toward this minimum, like drinks, tax, tip, etc.
  • Restriction as to which hours of the day, or days of the week
  • Mandatory tip of X% on the pre-discount amount
  • Dine-in only
  • Cash only
  • Possibly others
• I’ve heard that there is an additional restriction of one dining certificate per month per restaurant, but I don’t know where this is stated.
• There is the possibility that your favorite restaurant could drop out of the program in between the time you buy the certificate and when you go to redeem it.  This has happened to me, and it is a risk.
• You can search for participating restaurants before you purchase. On the home page of Restaurant.com, at the upper right, you’ll see a box that says “Step 1:  Find a Restaurant.”  Not all areas of the country have a wide selection of restaurants.  You can check before you buy.
• A particular restaurant’s restrictions are shown directly below the corresponding “Add To Cart” button. The restrictions should not be a surprise.  Here’s an example restrictions clause for a $25 dining certificate: “Valid Sunday-Thursday for Dinner Entrees only with a minimum $50. Not valid with any other offers. Excludes Alcohol. 20% Gratuity added. Cash Only.”  This is restrictive, but it’s anything but unclear.
• It never hurts to verify with the restaurant before buying. Restaurants should honor their word, but they might not.  This is not the fault of Restaurant.com, though; it’s the fault of short-sighted business practices.
• You do not need to sign up for recurring charges for either individual dining certificates or the Dinner of the Month Club. Both of these purchases are one-time purchases.  Some people have been hit by a third-party offer at checkout that results in a recurring charge.  This is not a charge from Restaurant.com.

Now, having said all of this, 80% off brings the cost of the 12-month Dinner of the Month Club down to where you can recoup the cost of the entire year with the redemption of just one of your 13 dining certificates.  The regular price is $120 (again, billed just once) for $300 worth of dining certificates plus a bonus $50 dining certificate.  With coupon code CHEF, the price is 80% off of $120, or $24.  So, by redeeming just one of the dining certificates — good for $25 off of qualified dining expenses as outlined above — you’re ahead of the game.  The rest of the dining certificates are gravy.

Anyway, I hope that this presents you with a well-rounded picture of Restaurant.com so that you can purchase wisely and with full understanding of the service.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

It’s a first!  For 99 hours only, starting today, 9/9/09, and ending on September 13th, 2009, at 3:01 PST, Restaurant.com is offering an unprecedented 90% off its Dining Certificates and Dinner of the Month Club!

The one-year Restaurant.com Dinner of the Month Club is only $12!  This gives you twelve $25 Dining Certificates, one per month for a year, good at thousands of restaurants for qualifying dining expenses.  Plus, you get an additional $50 Dining Certificate!

That’s $350 worth of Dining Certificates for only $12. If you use only one of the thirteen Dining Certificates you’ll get, then you’ve more than doubled your money!  The rest is gravy!  (And mashed potatoes, and filet mignon, and chicken marsala, and …)

Use coupon code NINETY to snag what might be a once-in-a-lifetime deal at Restaurant.com!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

Saw some recent retweets of my post on why you should stay far, far, far away from Swoopo (thanks to @SFBoater and @BidzillaDOTcom) and it reminded me of an important change that Swoopo had made recently.

A quick recap of the characteristics that made Swoopo (before the change, anyway) little more than thinly-veiled gambling:

• You bought the right to bid up front.
• Auctions started low, and each bid incremented the price only a small amount, less than what the bidder paid for the right to bid.
• Each bid pushed the auction end 20 seconds (or so) into the future (up to a month, when the auction ends for sure).  This rendered sniping irrelevant.
• Since there was only one winner of that auction, everyone else bidding lost what they paid for the bids.

Recently, Swoopo introduced the “Swoop It Now” feature.  If it sounds like eBay’s Buy It Now feature, then that’s basically what it is.  Up to one hour after the auction’s end, you can buy items for a set price. Not just for a set price above and beyond what you’ve sunk into bidding, but a set price, period.  Swoopo will discount your Swoop It Now price by the amount that it cost you to buy the bids you’ve spent in the auction (up to the amount of the item).

This makes the whole process quite a bit less “gambly” because you go in knowing that you can always cut bait and buy the item.  If you bid at the right time and get the item for a 92% discount, well hey, jolly jiggles for you, but you no longer have to be concerned about throwing your bid money down the drain.

At least, that would be the rational way to think about Swoopo auctions.  If you’ve done your research and if the price they’re offering looks reasonable, and you were going to buy the item anyway, then there’s little wrong with playing Swoopo.  It’s when you’d buy it only at a steep discount — or don’t really think about whether you even really want what’s offered — that it becomes dangerous.

Overall, this looks like Swoopo putting its ear to the ground and making itself more legitimate before it becomes too well-known how much money it’s raking in.

(Oh, was that casino parlance I just used?)

Anyway, do you Swoopo?  Will this change make you more likely to Swoopo, or will you still stay far away?

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

I visited my parents this past weekend.  My mother was telling me about what happened at a recent garage sale she went to.  Someone was selling a Corning Ware cornflower piggy bank.  These were made in England, and they’re very hard to find now.

The lady had marked the pig with a price of $5.  My mother snapped it up, took it up to her … and asked her, “Do you know that you could sell this for $100?”

My mom was right.  There are two listed on eBay right now.  One doesn’t have any bids but it’s starting at $25.  Another is Buy It Now and the seller is asking $200.  She didn’t need another one, but she didn’t want someone else to get it that cheaply, and there were plenty of dealers in town who would have spotted it easily and probably even would have tried to talk the seller down to $2, knowing full well it was worth $100.

So, she helped the seller out. I probably would have bought it for $5 myself, and not said a word.

I’ve come to be pretty careful about tipping my hand to what I know.  I made this mistake at a pawn shop when I bought a coin.  Not only was the coin marked below what it should have been, they got the weight wrong … and it was low.  Meaning:  I could have practically stolen that coin from them, and they never would have known.  But I made the mistake of saying, “Gee, that seems heavy.”  Sure enough, they weighed it, and promptly marked the price up.

At another pawn shop, though, I learned my lesson.  I bought some more coins, including some Peace and Morgan silver dollars.  The owner didn’t know which dates were the key dates.  I got a 1921 Peace dollar for a common-date price.  Just smiled, put them into my pocket, and walked off with a little spring in my step.

Some other time, I saw a set of handbells on eBay.  The seller had said that the bells were Schulmerich bells.  There were a few bids on them.  A commenter piped up and said, “Those are Whitechapel bells.”  Whitechapel bells are English bells and command higher prices.  The seller cancelled the listing, and relisted the bells, identified them correctly … and started at a much higher price.  They didn’t get any bids.  (Serves her right.)

I just don’t feel that it’s my job to educate people when I’m in negotiations with them.  If they’ve set a price on something, why should I argue that it’s worth more?  They’ll be happy if I buy it from them at that price, unless someone else tells them what it was really worth.  Then they’re the bad guy.

I just don’t see any good reason to kick good deals like these out the door.  How about you?

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

This is a special trick you can use if you haven’t signed up for Mr. Rebates yet:

• Sign up for Mr. Rebates, and get a $5 sign-up bonus.
• Buy a $25 dining certificate from Restaurant.com through their site (most are $10) and get a 20% rebate from Mr. Rebates.
• That brings your price down to $3 ($10, minus the $5 sign-up bonus, minus the $2 rebate), for a 70% savings, with no coupon!
• Through July 17th, 2009, using coupon code SEVENTY, you can get 70% off the regular price PLUS a free $10 Dining Certificate!  Since this makes the certificate only $3, you can get paid for buying a Restaurant.com $25 dining certificate after the sign-up bonus and the rebate!

Pretty cool, huh?

If you aren’t interested in signing up for Mr. Rebates now, (1) shame on you, but (2) no problem; you can still take advantage of the 70% off coupon directly through Restaurant.com. 

Once you have a Mr. Rebates account, there are hundreds of other online merchants that you can earn rebates for.  Restaurant.com is just the start.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

And if you bid on Swoopo.com, please stop.  Even if you’ve won an auction.  I can just about guarantee you’ll pay back every cent you saved on that one auction win, plus a lot more.

Swoopo bills itself as an auction site, but the auctions are little more than giant, real-time, horribly-addicting raffles: one winner, with lots of losers – some of them really big losers.  Coding Horror has posted about it twice, and he thinks it’s pure evil.

Here’s how the “auctions” work:

• Bids cost $0.75 each, bought in advance in bundles of 30.  (Red flag #1:  You buy in, with real money, with no guarantee of winning.)
• Each bid raises the price of the auction by $0.15 or less.  (Red flag #2:  The price climbs slowly.  Lots of bids are placed.  A huge number of bids are placed if you’re talking about “penny” auctions: each bid increases the price $0.01.)
• Each bid adds time to the end of the auction.  (Red flag #3:  Sniping doesn’t work.  The low price relative to retail means that there’s a very good chance someone else is watching and will bid over you.)
• The auction does have a firm ending date.  It’s just so far in the future that it really doesn’t matter.  (Red flag #4:  It’s technically not a lottery, but practically it is.)

Some other red flags:

• Very limited bid history while an auction is going on. With eBay you can see the entire bid history of an auction.  On Swoopo you’re limited to the last ten bids.  There can be hundreds, if not thousands, or tens of thousands, of bids that are inaccessible during the auction.  It makes it very difficult to know how many people are bidding against you.  If the “BidButler” is used (an automatic proxy) and if there are a lot of bids placed all at once, you get almost no information about how many people bid against you, or how many times you bid.  All you see is “169 BidButler bids” and the last ten bids.
• The record of the completed auctions is there, but searching them is like finding something in the tax code, with all of the pages mixed up, without an index. There is no text search feature, so if you’re interested in what a particular item went for, you have one option for checking out the price history:  plow through all 63,000+ completed auctions, ten at a time.  The only price history that’s easily accessible is a “recently sold for” price on the auction.  Just one.  The rest you have to find on your own, and who knows even how many times they’ve sold that item?  It could have been just one other time — 43,000 auctions ago.

As an example, there’s a “penny auction” right now for a one-ounce gold bar.  Ballpark retail price for this item is $1,000.  I’ve watched the auction for the past few hours off and on.  Here’s what I know about it:

• I’ve watched the price go up from $18 to $28 in the past few hours. Since it’s a “penny auction,” each bid raises the price $0.01.  So, that means 1,000 bids have been placed in the past few hours.  People spent $750 to place those bids.  Judging by some of the other prices, I’m thinking the auction started at zero.  If 2,800 bids were placed, that’s enough to buy the gold bar at retail, twice.  And the auction isn’t over.
• The “recently sold for” price is extremely misleading. Underneath the picture of the bar is shown: “Recently sold for $216.98.”  It’s true that it did sell for that price: Auction #177136, which ended on May 17th, 2009, at 13:28 PDT.  (The winner spent $697.50 in bids, though, so he only saved 10% off of the retail price.)  But the most recent price it sold for was far less than that: $3.71 (plus $106.50 in bids).  So not only is the quoted price not the most recent price, it’s the highest price I could find with a decent effort.  (Can I say it’s the highest price that it ever sold for on Swoopa?  No.  I went through over 300 pages of past auctions manually and did a google search, but only came up with part of them, and life’s too short.)  Here are 32 auction results for the same gold bar.  The next highest selling price is barely half of $216.98:

Some people got great deals, others got mediocre deals, and at least one guy paid 50% more than he needed to. (At least he won the bar, though.) What’s the craziest part of all of this? The 32 bars cost about $32,000 or so to purchase. There was about $100,000 spent on bids for these auctions. Enough to purchase the bars three times.

There are a few big winners, but a whole lot of big, big losers.  Though I don’t think the solution is to get Congress to do something about it, I will say this about Swoopo:  Stay far, far away.

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

This coupon has ended … but check my coupons and promotional codes to see if there’s a fresh one!

The code is:  SPECIAL.  The site is:  Restaurant.com.  The price of a $25 Dining Certificate, (normally $10) with this coupon is:  $2. The price of a 12-month Dinner of the Month Club, with a bonus $50 certificate, $350 total in certificates, is only:  $24.

The coupon is good through:  May 25th, 2009. So head on over to Restaurant.com for some SPECIAL cheap eats!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

If you’ve shopped on the Internet — and if you’re reading this, you probably have — then you know that there are great deals to be had just about everywhere you look.  You’ve probably also stumbled across sites that make online shopping even sweeter by giving you a kickback on your online purchases just for clicking through their site.  The more you buy from merchants on their site, the more they pay you.

Now, they’re not just being nice guys in giving you free money, of course.  They get paid more for closing the sale than they pay out to you as a rebate.  But regardless how they can get the money to you, it’s yours for the taking if you want it!

Here are a few sites for your rebating pleasure.

EBates – This is the first rebate site I heard about.  I heard about it in 2002.  A friend pointed me toward it when I was making some big purchases.  I got my first Big Fat Check™ and wrote about it on the site even before it was a blog. That was a long time ago.   But anyway, the site is still going strong, with hundreds and hundreds of stores and a great sign-up bonus.  You get $5 for signing up.  They pay out Big Fat Checks  quarterly, and as long as you’ve earned $5.01 or more in rebates by their cut-off, you score a check.  To accumulate rebates, just log in and click through to the merchants from their site instead of going there directly.  That’s it!

UPromise – I’ve talked about before: you can set up a few things once, forget about them, and still get rebates that go into your UPromise account for the benefit of someone’s college expenses.  Beyond that, you can also click through to merchants and get rebates in your account that way.  This site combines online rebate offerings with other offline rebates, so it’s a great weaponto have in your rebate arsenal.

FatWallet – Rebates, coupons, deals, steals, and over 1 million users. Plus, they have a cool little Firefox plugin that goes right into your title bar and will let you know if the merchant you’re visiting participates in FatWallet’s rebate program. If the swirl is red, it reminds you to go back to FatWallet to click through there for the rebate. Pretty slick!

MyPoints – I use MyPoints quite a bit.  You can read a few e-mails and earn free gift cards without spending a dime, or you can shop and earn them faster.  Calculating the equivalent percentage rebate is a little bit of a trick, but a merchant that pays 3 points per dollar is the equivalent of a 2% rebate, and 10 points per dollar is about a 7% rebate.  ($10 gift cards go for about 1450 points.)  Join MyPoints and check it out!

InboxDollars – This site has an e-mail component similar to MyPoints as well as opportunities to earn money for surveys and other offers.  It does have a shopping component as well.  There’s a $5 bonus to start at InboxDollars, and you earn 10% of what people you refer earn.  I have yet to try any of the surveys but the cash bounties on a few of the offers seem pretty sweet.

Mr. Rebates – It’s a shame I hadn’t caught this one earlier!  They’ve been around for a while.  Much like EBates, Mr. Rebates has rebates tied to hundreds of online merchants.  There’s a $5 bonus to start, payout is a low $10, and you can earn 20% of what anyone you refer earns.  It’s stood the test of at least a few years so I signed up and I’ll give it a shot!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

A while back I found that rice and beans was something that I could eat pretty much week in and week out.  Since, however, I come from a long, proud line of pack rats, I was worried about catching gadgetitis — the affliction of having rooms filled with single-use appliances — from my ancestors.

I never quite got the knack of cooking rice on the stovetop.  I had to watch it carefully or it would boil over and burn the rice to the bottom of the pot.  Other easier-to-prepare options were too expensive.  So, eventually, I figured that a rice cooker might actually be decent at cooking rice, and one weekend in Costco I decided to pick up an Aroma® rice cooker.  It was $29 — we got the ARC-1000 which is actually a better deal there than at Amazon — but it was $29 very well spent.

It’s a piece of cake to make really good rice with this thing.  Even I can’t screw it up:

• Measure up to 10 rice cups (1 rice cup = 6 ounces) of uncooked rice.
• Rinse rice under water until it rinses clear.
• Measure the same amount of water, plus 3 ounces.
• Put rice and water in the cooker.
• Push the “white rice” button if it’s white rice, and the “brown rice” button if it’s brown rice.
• Take the cooked rice out when it beeps.

That’s all I do.  The rice comes out great.  It’s so easy, and I don’t have to pay attention to it while it’s cooking, or even guess how long it will take to cook.  It just knows.  (I do take it out shortly after it’s done so that it doesn’t dry out or stick to the bottom, though.)

My Aroma rice cooker has already paid for itself in saved time and aggravation.  A+!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons

** This coupon has expired, but check my coupon code page to see if there’s a fresh one! **

It’s your LUCKY day!  Get 80% off Restaurant.com Dining Certificates and Dinner of the Month Club memberships with coupon code LUCKY through today, April 30th.

At 80% off, a one-year Dinner of the Month Club membership pays for itself if you redeem just one of the twelve $25 Dining Certificates.  The rest is gravy! You can get $350 off of qualifying dining expenses at thousands of restaurants for just $24 with a one-year Restaurant.com Dinner of the Month membership.

So enter coupon code LUCKY by the end of today to get some great savings on dining out!

Hot hot hot money questions at Cash Commons