Why Olive Garden Offers Very Few Coupons

If you’re an Olive Garden fan, don’t bother looking for coupons. Sure, you can find a handful of printable Olive Garden coupons from online coupon sites like 8coupons.com or retailmenot.com, but you may have a hard time finding an Olive Garden restaurant that actually honors them. Olive Garden has always had a policy of printing menus with lower prices throughout the year as opposed to offering coupons that reduce the cost of your meal every now and then.

In some ways, this is a customer-friendly policy. The average meal at Olive Garden in 2010 came to just about $15 which is a great value even for a casual dining restaurant. Competitor chains, like Capital Grille and Carrabba’s, have prices $40-$60 higher per meal, a significant amount of money, especially in a weak economy.

Why does Olive Garden not offer coupons like many other restaurant chains?

The answer comes in three parts. The first part’s already been discussed above–Olive Garden puts a premium on lowering the cost of their menu items and wine list rather than issuing coupons for dollars off a single meal. Part of the appeal of Olive Garden is that the food is inexpensive compared to other restaurants in town. With antipasti ranging from $5 to $10, an entrees as cheap as $9, a meal at Olive Garden is already offered at the absolute lowest price the chain can afford.

The second reason for Olive Garden’s lack of coupons is good old tradition. Olive Garden was started as an experiment for food company General Mills in the early 80s. At that time, Italian restaurant chains just didn’t exist–Italian restaurants were standalone businesses, often low-cost pizza and pasta joints or high-end gourmet dining. Olive Garden was a test of the American taste for the middle of the road, casual dining Italian-American style restaurant. Coupons weren’t a part of the company then as a means of passing savings on to the menu. Olive Garden doesn’t offer coupons today because they’ve never really offered that many coupons.

The final reason for Olive Garden’s lack of coupons is public perception. Olive Garden’s parent company, Darden Restaurants, sees offering coupons as a cheapening of a franchise’s brand. None of their restaurants (including Red Lobster and Longhorn Steakhouse) offer very many coupons for that reason. Darden Restaurants thinks that if they offered lots of Olive Garden coupons, people would think the food was less valuable.