Clark's Big Book of Bargains (3 page)

• Internet •

• www.cutouthunger.org
  

• www.salesmountain.com
  

• www.couponmountain.com
  

* RESTAURANT *

I’m a frequent violator of the first rule of saving money on food, which is
Eat at home.
I eat about 80 percent of my meals out, and that’s not a smart financial strategy. But if you do want to eat out—at least occasionally—and not spend a fortune, I have some tips that will make an enormous difference in what you spend.

In a fine restaurant, the big profit centers for the restaurant are alcohol, appetizers, and dessert. You’ll lower the bill by about a third if you treat the main course as the main reason you’ve gone out, and avoid all the extras, especially the alcohol and the dessert. If you like to have a drink before your meal, have a glass of wine before you go to the restaurant. You have to know yourself. If one drink would impair your driving, don’t have it.

I get a lot of heat from people on this idea, because they say part of going out to a nice restaurant is to throw caution to the winds and not worry about price. And that may be fine, especially for a special event like a birthday or an anniversary. But I look at restaurants the way I do travel. If you travel economically, you create more opportunity to travel. If you eat out economically, you’re free to eat out more frequently. Instead of treating a restaurant meal as a very rare, extra-special pleasure, where you spend a fortune whenever you go, why not instead afford yourself the opportunity to enjoy that special experience more often? It just takes some discipline. Think about it. You’d normally pay as much for a glass of wine in a nice restaurant as a whole bottle that you would drink at home. The cost of a mixed drink to a restaurant usually is around 25 cents—for a drink that will cost you $4 to $6. It’s an enormously expensive markup.

If you enjoy wine with your dinner, you might be able to bring your own, depending on the law where you live. If it’s legal, many different kinds of restaurants will allow this, even very upscale ones. Call ahead and ask, and tell the restaurant, “We have our own favorite wine.” Then you don’t sound so nervy. If they allow it, they’ll charge a “corkage” fee, usually $3 to $10 for each bottle, which covers their cost to uncork the wine and serve it, using their glasses. The markup on a bottle of wine is so large that you’ll still save a lot of money. I’m told that the truly classy thing to do is bring a nice bottle of wine that the restaurant doesn’t serve. If it’s really nice, you can offer the maitre d’ a taste.

Desserts take an even bigger bite out of your wallet than alcohol. They’re gigantically profitable for the restaurant—that’s why they make such a show of presenting the dessert tray. My wife, Lane, had a dessert recently that she just adores. It’s a sliver of waffle, two microscopic scoops of ice cream, some caramel and some fudge—and would you believe, it was $9! The cost of the ingredients couldn’t have hit 50 cents. Desserts are the Bermuda Triangle for your money.

Another thing to beware of are the “specials.” Some people feel it’s impolite to ask the cost when a server is describing the specials, but to me it’s impolite that the description doesn’t include the cost. I ask. One of my radio show staffers, Joni Alpert, ordered a lobster special one night, and later was shocked to find that her dinner cost $72. Joni was so embarrassed. She and her husband, Hal, were out with friends, and she never would have ordered the lobster if she knew how expensive it was. Restaurants often use the specials to get an extra-large profit out of you.

At mid-level restaurants, the best way to save money is the time of day you visit. While high-end restaurants would not stoop so low as to have peak and off-peak pricing, mid-priced restaurants are very practical about this. They’ll offer early-bird or late-evening savings opportunities, or a limited menu of special items if you order before 7
P.M.
Let the clock work for you. If the restaurant managers know it’s going to be packed at 7
P.M.,
and you’re willing to help them with their traffic flow by eating a bargain at 6
P.M.,
do it. Early-bird specials always were a joke about elderly people in Arizona and Florida, but the way I look at it, the joke’s on me if I don’t take advantage of it.

One of the coolest ways to save money at high-end restaurants is to eat lunch there instead of dinner. The lunch menu usually will have the same or similar items as the dinner menu, but they’re cheaper at lunch because there’s price resistance to what people will pay before dark. So you can have the same elegant level of food and service for half the price, or less. You’ll get a slightly smaller portion, but not equivalent to the difference in price. That tells you what kind of markup there is on food at a high-end restaurant.

So many restaurants now give portions that are ridiculously large. They’re just too big to eat. You can either try to eat it all and end up stuffed, or take it home and, as so many people do, throw it away. So why not split an entree with someone, if you both like the same item, even if you have to pay a plate charge? My co-author, Mark Meltzer, likes to take the leftovers to work for lunch the next day, and heats them up in the microwave. He does that with home-cooked dinners also, and as a result he eats well and spends very little each month eating lunch out. But most restaurant leftovers, while taken home with good intentions, end up in the trash.

Since I don’t buy a lot of extras at restaurants, I have a lower total bill, and that could mean short-changing the server. So if the server has been delightful, I often tip 25 percent of the bill, much more than the 15 to 20 percent guideline. I may be frugal, but I believe in being generous when it comes to tipping.

If you want to learn more about the restaurants in a city you may be planning to visit, try picking up a copy of the local city magazine, or reading the food column online from the local newspaper. There’s also the
Zagat Survey,
which is available online (www.zagat.com) for a subscription fee. These sources may help steer you to restaurants that offer better value.

• Tips on Restaurants •

• At a fine restaurant, you’ll chop a third off your bill if you avoid alcohol, appetizers, and desserts.
  

• Ask the price of the “special” before you order. Restaurants like to get extra-large profits out of these choices.
  

• Visit a fine restaurant for lunch instead of dinner. You’ll get the same food for much less money.
  

• At mid-level restaurants, take advantage of off-peak prices, such as early-bird and late-night discounts.
  

• If the restaurant gives giant-size portions, try sharing an entree with a companion.
  

• Internet •

• www.zagat.com
  

* FAST-FOOD *

In a high-end restaurant, buying the “special” can cost you. But at fast-food restaurants, where I have my greatest culinary expertise, buying the special will save you a lot of money.

Most fast-food restaurants offer rotating specials featuring one of their burgers or sandwiches. For example, McDonald’s has a chicken sandwich and a fish sandwich, each currently on sale for 99 cents, and Burger King has a number of items on its 99-cent menu. Wendy’s has a regular 99-cent menu, but it’s the only one of the fast-food restaurants that does it that way.

You’ll do your body and your wallet a favor if you buy whatever burger or sandwich is on special and skip the french fries, which are the highest profit-margin item. Your doctor would be happy to tell you that french fries aren’t his or her choice for you as a vegetable anyway.

Fast-food restaurants love to sell you “combo” meals, and tell you what a great discount you’re getting by buying them, because the burger, fries, and drink cost less in the combo than they would if you bought them individually.

Wendy’s is an interesting example, because it does something you’re not supposed to do, and that’s price for two different customers in the same restaurant. Wendy’s has the ultra-large burger, fries, and drink combo at a very high price, usually $5 to $6, and also appeals to the price-oriented shopper with a 99-cent menu line. Can you guess which of the menu boards I order from? It’s become almost a cliché about me that I do some burger rearranging when I go to Wendy’s. I buy two 99-cent “double-stacks” with cheese and put them together, giving me a half-pound cheeseburger for $1.98. That’s the same amount of burger I’d get if I bought Wendy’s half-pounder with cheese, which is more than a dollar more. (I could eat the double-stacks separately, but then I’d have too much bread.) It’s just using their menu to my advantage.

Drinks are pretty expensive too, even at 99 cents. My co-author, Mark Meltzer, often buys a burger and a salad at Wendy’s for $1.98, and takes it back to the office to enjoy with a 50-cent drink from the vending machine, a glass of water, or a soda he brought from home and chilled in the office refrigerator. You may think I’m crazy, watching a few dollars to this degree, but it adds up. According to an article in the April 2000 issue of
Money
magazine, if you skip the $4 gourmet coffee and croissant every morning and instead put the $80 a month into a mutual fund, you could have $146,000 in twenty-five years (assuming a 12 percent annualized market return). Saving a few dollars a day on breakfast or lunch can turn into a lot of money.