What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Last night I decided that we really needed a night out to get a break from all the craziness going on in our lives right now.  Sounds like a great idea, right?  It really is until you remember that part of the craziness is a small cash flow problem.  Shoot, who am I kidding?  It's a fairly large cash flow problem but that's fodder for another post.  :-) 

Since it was the end of the month (can you believe January is almost gone?), I knew that I could probably find a code somewhere for Restaurant.com and get a huge discount.   Off I went to Coupon Mom and sure enough behind the restaurant coupons tab was an 80% off code.  Sweet!  Since I wanted this to be fun, I looked for places that we've not been to and picked a couple that are fairly close to the house.  We picked Ms. Judy's Buffet as our destination tonight and set out.  Their menu looked pretty good with a seafood buffet on Friday and Saturday nights.  After putting my discount code in the $25 gift certificate cost a measly $3.50.

It didn't take long to pull up in front of Ms. Judy's.  There was no problem finding a parking spot because Ms. Judy had turned off the lights and gone home!  Not only had she turned off the lights, she took all the furniture with her and there was a "For Rent" sign in the window.  Hey!  What about my $3.50???  We ended up a couple of miles down the road at the Olive Branch Catfish Company.  The food was great as was the service.  Since we didn't have a coupon the budget is blown.  But hey, we've got a nice sheet of paper we won't be using to turn over and use to figure out Plan B for the budget.  


The moral of this story is use Restaurant.com because it's a great deal but if it's somewhere you've never been, call and be sure they are still in business before you spend that $3.50.