2 for 1 restaurant deals

luckybert

A few years ago you could go to some restaurants mid week and they would do 2 for 1 deals on meals - you didn't need a card.
It seems tastecard have taken over this deal so you have to pay £40 a year to get a card and then they offer the same deal for about 2 restaurants only.
Have I got that wrong?
Even the meerkat deal is in association with tastecard it seems.

jon81uk

tastecard has been going for years (probably at least 10 years) so they haven't taken deals away, they just continue to offer the 2for1 and 50% off they always have. Now of course Meerkat also offer some of their deals.
A few years ago there were many chain restaurants and they were all expanding. Even before the lockdown closures many chains were starting to scale back, there were too many restaurants all offering similar things. They needed to offer deals to get people in.
Also of course costs have risen a lot recently.
Now they don't need to offer as many discounts as many branches have closed down, there is less competition.
Some places are still offering 50% off in quiet weeks (Toby Carvery were doing that Mon-Wed in January). Some places like Pizza Express have set up new loyalty schemes instead. Other places just try and be competitive all the time.

Might be worth thinking that if Bella Italia and Frankie & Benny's could offer 2for1 on weekdays maybe their food wasn't worth the full price at weekends. Find somewhere you think is correctly priced to start with, rather than offering a deal some of the time.

ch3shirecat4

if you have an aa card you can get discount for a number of pubs near you

Neil49

The cheap option is to buy very basic insurance via Compare the Market for around £1 or so and get the Meerkat offers.

In addition to the food offer they also include 241 on cinema tickets and 25% off drinks at Caffe Nero in the deal.