Food promotions without prices (piss me off).
Red Lobster, all you can eat shrimp. Your choice of Garlic Shrimp Scampi, Hand-Breaded Shrimp, Shrimp Linguine Alfredo, Crunchy Popcorn Shrimp, and Buffalo Shrimp. You choose two of the above, and when you’re ready, they’ll bring you more and more.
I wouldn’t eat all day, go there around 5pm, and could easily put down hundreds of shrimp. I live for buffets, I don’t want to leave until I know the restaurant lost money on me as a customer.
When determining if something is of value, one must know the price. Value relates the expectations of product quality/benefit to a price. When seeing a commercial for food on the television, I won’t even consider going to the restaurant without knowing what I will have to pay for the meal. The whole time I’m looking at the delicious food on the commercials, I’m saying in the back of my head, “Ok, how much, ok, how much, ok how much.”
I looked for a second source of information on the Endless Shrimp promotion, their website. Nothing. There was all kinds of useless information on this site, except for what it costs to enjoy their newest promotion.
To make this an informative piece, I actually called Red Lobster and found out what the meal costs; $15.99.
If a restaurant desires to keep their pricing information hidden, how confident are they in their own promotion? If it is such a good deal, why not post the price? Why make the consumer actually go to the point of sale or call the restaurant to find out the price?
$15.99 isn’t THAT bad of a price, but because it wasn’t stated in the commercial, I would never get it (this is the only time I’ve actually looked up a price before). I can’t imagine that promotions without the price do better on average than those that display the price. Basically, this is a huge pet peeve of mine and I get pissed off when I see it on TV. I love food. I am lazy. I am cheap. I love buffets.