I own a restaurant that is very popular in West Des Moines, Iowa. Last year a sales representative from Restaurant.com came to our business and asked us to sign up for the program. We agreed to allow them to sell 5 certificates per day, however, no more than 20 per week. Furthermore, we wrote in on the contract that we can cancel after a 30 day period if we are unsatisfied.
Two months later we added all of the certificates that were brought into the restaurant and redeemed. All of the certificates that they sell have the SOLD date on them and we then noticed that one day they sold 17! Looking into further - they had been selling more than that and we could only track the ones that were being redeemed. We then found out that they were selling $25 gift certificates for only $2!!! The problem is that - the customer will never come to your place and pay full price when they can buy dinners online for only $2!
If you own a restaurant you will notice that they only deal with local owners - these are the ones that they can take advantage of!
NOW HERE IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING: We called restaurant.com and asked them to cancel - they refused! We asked them to send us a copy of the contract - they faxed it to us AND our signature was forged! We sent them a copy of the agreement that we had kept and they compared it to the one that they had and then they accused us of forgery. OMG! Funny thing is that everyone from there office had signitures that matched on the compared agreements, ours however, did not match! Restaurant. Coms sales representative was nolonger with them and it was clear that they had forged our signature. We then asked Restaurant.com to tell us how many certificates were sold by them and not yet presented to our restaurant - they told us on the phone that they had 1145 certificates outstanding valued at $25 each! Thats over $28,000 in FREE meals or discounts that they said we needed to honor!
We had an attorney send them a letter and they finally took us off their website 60 days later. BEFORE that - they called us and told us that we had to do an exit phone interview in order for them to cancel us! We asked them to email us an update of the outstanding certificates that they sold and explained to them that the accoutant wanted to put it on our books as a liability. They refused to tell us verbally or in writing.
Bottomline: do not use this service. You will be lied to, and then you will feel obligated to honor the certificates in which you received no money for - because you dont want the customer mad or angry with your establishment.
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