One of my favorite chain restaurants is TGI Friday’s. There’s one in Everett, MA, which is not far from us at all. I love this location because it has a HUGE bar area, which is separate from the dining room, and has many HDTVs. It makes for a great, adults-only sports bar atmosphere. Mike and I love to go there, plop our butts on a couple of bar stools, have a coupla beers and a meal, and enjoy whatever game is on TV. We don’t have cable at home…our choice, as we don’t feel there is enough good programming on it to justify the expense. But since all the Red Sox games are on cable now, this is the go-to place to watch them.
In fact, we’re planning on going there for lunch tomorrow, to watch Johnny Pesky get his number 6 retired at Fenway.
Anyhoo, did you know that they have a loyalty program for their customers? It is called Give Me More Stripes. It is 100% free to sign up. I’ve been seeing an awful lot of similar programs that charge you a “membership” fee to sign up and get perks and discounts. This is ridiculous. The whole idea of this thing should be to get people to return to the store or restaurant, why make them pay extra for anything? If a business rewards frequent customers, they are more likely to keep coming back.
You can sign up online, right now, and they will generate a temporary membership card that you can print out and use right away. They will mail you a real one in about 10 days. If you forget your card at the restaurant, you can use your phone number to get credited for your visit. Or you can go home, log into your account on the website, and enter the info off of your receipt to get credited.
What you get: For every $100 you spend at any Friday’s location, you will be emailed an $8 gift certificate which can be used for food purchases only. Alcohol bought with food will be counted towards your rewards, but if you just pop in for a beer, sorry, no can do. This is not a problem for us, because we always eat when we’re there. In our case, they would count the cost of both the food and the beer, so that’s cool.
And we do like the food there. I’m not a big steak eater, but Mike is, and he likes their steaks. My favorite thing is their broccoli-cheese soup, followed by the chicken fingers with honey-mustard sauce. Their cedar-planked salmon pasta is very tasty, too, I had that last week.
So, if you live near a Friday’s location, go and sign up!
