Show HN: A directory of restaurants with links to buy gift cards to support them | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A directory of restaurants with links to buy gift cards to support them

givelocal.co

96 pointsbrentsum56 comments

My real worry is that if the restaurant goes under (or sometimes, even changes ownership), your gift card is worthless.

Dunno if a chargeback would go through, since you technically received what you paid for.

Yeah, these gift cards are essentially free loans given to borrowers with extremely poor credit. I’m still going to do it, but I’m considering it to be a donation to my local restaurant scene.

it sucks - but i think a better option is to use a charity to do this rather than give 'em cash. You lose taxes twice - once from your own end, and once from the restaurant's end.

I don't think you can "donate" to a for-profit private business without paying taxes...

no, i meant donate to a charity, whose sole purpose is to help those businesses in need. You don't donate directly to the business (which is the tax hit).

Are charities allowed to give assets to for profit corporations?

Whawhawhat? How about to the workers those for-profits are currently not supporting?

The website lists a restaurant (Southern Proper in Boston) that shut its doors months ago. The space already has a new tenant, has been renovated and has new signs up.

Edit: It appears the site immediately posts any user submissions without any verification. I posted Toro, and it immediately went live on the site. They’re worth posting, because they’re sharing 50% of gift card proceeds with staff through the end of April: https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zIuPkB4U-/

It is a bad idea anyway. The revenue will be missing anyway, if not now then later when they are trying to re-bounce but most of their guest come to eat for 'free' (well, already paid, but not for the food).

If one genuinely interested in saving a restaurant should invest or better, donate.

Many of those later meals will have a ticket higher than the gift card, so will still generate some cashflow.

I like the thought of this idea, but it won’t work. If the business spends the money from the cards now then it will be on the hook for the meals later. It is basically just an interest-free loan to the business that will have to be paid back. The party that is really being bailed out here is the landlord.

A better approach would be to let the restaurant go under and have some way to pledge that you will support the new restaurant that opens when things return to normal.

We're better off having the government backstop this--pay the rent, pay unemployment to the employees, and have society pay at the end of the day. The tricky part is getting money where it's needed. The Fed is doing what it can, but that's basically keeping banks open.

This. It's way too complicated to let society sort this thing out by themselves. For one, because only the "visible" companies like restaurants will benefit, and e.g. companies in the supply chain will be easily forgotten.

Interest free microloans might be exactly what is needed to keep these businesses viable. The ability to spread out the impact over a year could be critical. This might not be enough, but it's good. Better is better.

There are a variety of reasons why letting the restaurant go under is really inefficient for everyone. The overhead of shutting down one business and starting another adds up to waste.

It all depends on how long the shutdown goes for. If it is a couple of weeks then yes a micro loan makes sense, but if this is something that goes on for many months then not so much.

My guess is these business are just going to sit there empty and the cost of restarting should be low. If the restauranters have the money (provided by their loyal customers) they will probably go straight back into the same location where they were.

The other factor to consider is even once the restrictions are lifted it is likely that we will be in a deep recession/depression. I can’t see there being huge demand for eating out when everyone is broke.

I built something like this 15 years ago, it is still up but I have not touched it in years ( Canada: https://foodpages.ca/?giftcards=1 / USA: https://dinehere.us/?giftcards=1 )

In my aforementioned experience trying to entice restaurants to sell eGift cards online is a waste of time.

Good luck though.

Why just restaurants? This should be expanded to support barber shops, nail salons and massage business. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few other business that could benefit.

I usually pay my barber in cash. If I wanted to send her a payment in lieu of my next appointment, what would be the most sensible way to do that?

I could mail her a check I suppose.

ACH transfer? (I assume I would have to ask her for her bank account info which might be a little awkward.)

Venmo? (I've tried to avoid it thus far.)

Zelle, works with banks and only needs email/phone.

My barber has an iPhone, so I offered to Apple Pay him (no fee if linked to debit/cash account). All I needed was his phone number.

Sincere question - how widespread is actual check usage in the US nowadays? As in, would "mail her a check" be a colloquialism for an Apple Pay transfer or similar, or would it mean just what it says - write out a check, mail it, wait for her to cash it?

(Question comes from Norway, a small country with only a handful of banks which very early collaborated to get electronic payment options available - to the extent that debet card terminals are everywhere, even kids have cards - and I think the last time I saw a check was in 1992 or so, at which point my reaction was "wow, do these still exist?")

Checks are still an everyday thing in the USA and Canada for rent, grocery stores and more-expensive services.

Checks are generally not used for small amounts, and where the Not Sufficient Fee (NSF) fees would be a problem. So usually not for restaurants, barbers, etc.

Banks until recently issued free "basic design" checks, but it looks like my national-level bank stopped doing that last year.

The advantages of checks over eletronic payments is that you don't need an always online network, and you can mail or give checks in advance of the payment date.

That's on the roadmap! Starting with restaurants as that's the world I know best right now

Barbershops etc. are a class of business that gift cards aren't the best fit for because they have finite, nonscalable capacity.

You buy a gift card for a timeslot, which helps the barbershop's cashflow now, but when you redeem it later, you're clobbering it's future income.

A barber can work overtime and open up more slots, but he might never catch up. Unless you have really short expiry dates or low redemption rates. In which case the gift cards become more like a donation, which under the current circumstances wouldn't be a bad thing.

> You buy a gift card for a timeslot, which helps the barbershop's cashflow now, but when you redeem it later, you're clobbering it's future income.

This is most business though. You have unearned revenue which helps because you have accounts receivable and you're waiting on cash. It bridges the gap.

I agree partially on barber shops though because few have AR. Still, they get revenue upfront which can cover hard costs during this time.

Thanks for putting this together. I’d recommend adding some indicator that the results load async. I thought you had zero restaurants in Austin and left the page after a second because there was no loading indicator. In fact, until I got to Pittsburgh, I thought it was a site with no listings asking for my email (because Pittsburgh loads way faster).

(Adding an index to your database for city or however the queries are formed would probably also help).

There is also https://rallyforrestaurants.com/

Great to see people coming up with creative ways to support the restaurant community. These efforts should be critical to keep the business running and take out and delivery will keep back of house employees working. I'm still really concerned about front of house employees. What can be done for servers, bartenders, hosts?

"Don't see your city? Hit Add Location above and your city will be added when you add it's first restaurant"

I could be blind but I cannot see "Add Location"

It's actually "Add a Restaurant" in the top right.

cool project. Good extension of the pledge show hn the other day

I’d love for a feature “within 25 miles of {zipcode} so I can find some around me. (I’m in the suburbs where local doesn’t mean the same city)

Clicked “view all cities” Not down to type in the name of every city around me

You can type the name of the city you're searching for on this page - https://givelocal.co/search

Great feedback though! This is definitely something we pulled together quickly over the last few days.

That search page seems to use infinite scroll for its results. That makes searching within the results using the browser's Find function impossible.

In the UK there's https://saveyourindiehighstreet.uk

Can't we have this site serving straight HTML with links? Why we should always have JS involved for even most simple tasks?

I've asked someone who likes using tons of JavaScript before and the response I received was along the lines of "It saves developer time."

I don't get that one because in my experience, writing straight HTML is simpler than writing JavaScript. The real problem seems to be that many people today seem to have learned frontend web development through fancy JavaScript frameworks and don't know any other way. Since learning the simpler way to do it is more work, they don't bother. That's just my impression, however, and I don't have any hard data. Another possibility is that people want to learn the latest sexy technology and React/Angular/whatever people use these days is that.

We probably need good tutorials about how to create a nice looking HTML pages. Pure HTML, maybe with CSS. I'd prefer page to be self-contained - a document, not an app. This way some accessibility problems could be avoided too.

At least we may have static page generators which execute JS once on server side - for pages which don't really need interactivity (documents, not apps). There are a lot of them.

There are many resources available today on how to create a nice looking HTML/CSS page. Looks like Mozilla has a complete guide:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn

This goes into JavaScript later as well but it seems to be the way I'd consider proper: only using JavaScript for things that can only be done in JavaScript.

i don't know if i would have made the same choices they made, but I've been developing websites since 2000 (so before one relied on JS for anything but sugar) and I prefer to work with the component model of things like webcomponents, react, etc than I do with plain HTML.

So it's not just about "i don't know how". I just think it fits my mental model better.

Do you approach pages as applications or as marked up documents?

In those many cases when the page just carries information - it's not, for example, application-in-page, where you can change parameters and see the results - it's a document. A document is simpler than an app, doesn't need full power of Turing complete engine, and because of that, allows easier tools to manipulate - extract data, render differently (like for users with disabilities), modify (e.g., combine with another data set).

Sure, documents can be considered apps - a simple version of apps. There are also reasons to explicitly maintain strictly lower complexity for something which is not a proper app. For those, webcomponents could be overkill. Just imagine webcomponents with which you never use at least some of their capabilities?

I don't see much of a difference if you're doing SSR though. It'd just mean not delivering code that never gets used. If I'm just showing documents, then that's what it is. It needs nothing else.

I'd guess because if someone is building something in their free time they're likely to build it either using whatever technology is most fun for them, or using whichever framework they're most excited to learn.

For most frontend devs that's going to mean something a little bit more exciting than a static site.

Yes, I understand that if you're mostly doing (at work) these things this way, you may be inclined to do the same way your own project.

That doesn't mean you can't do better - and for some people "better" can be without JS, for many reasons, including convenience of end users. By now it's probably also an interesting challenge - create a good, but straightforward (i.e., "simple") no-JS page.

Can someone clarify this for me? I thought that businesses generally were not able to book gift card revenue until after the gift card was redeemed. If that is the case, then I don't see how this really helps them. It's not like they can use that money to pay bills.

You think booking revenue at a later date restricts them from spending the cash they receive now? It helps them because they receive cash that can be physically spent for whatever they need. FASB guidelines just prevents them from matching those expenses to revenue from a tax perspective. If I receive $250,000 in gift card sales in 2020 but all $250,000 get redeemed in 2021, then your revenue in 2020 should not reflect this $250k, but instead be reflected in 2021. All else equal, in the event the restaurant owner took the convenient and simple path of recognizing the expenses in 2020, it would just mean their tax bill in 2021 would be much higher because their net revenue (sales - COGs) would be high as a result of the $250k in revenue being realized.

Source: I used to own a restaurant.

> You think booking revenue at a later date restricts them from spending the cash they receive now?

I did not know what to think, as I have never dealt with this before. Thank you for explaining it.

I’m working with a group on a version of this now that allows customers to request a gift card from any local business in the US. I could use some help a pm and a full stack dev with ecomm / payments experience. Ping me if interested. Michaelpatrickmcc@gmail.com

Isn’t this what commercial paper is for? Surely we shouldn’t take the stimulus and send it aloft under the guise of charity? I’d rather just give that money to a small business owner than forestall the inevitable.

In my experience, 90% of locally-owned restaurants have gift cards. So what's the point of a website that attempts to list 90% of restaurants? Why not just use Google Maps?

Sometimes it’s nice to have a list view. Google maps only provides geolocated results in a small list so you’d have to move around the city quite a bit to find the whole list.

It can be useful to be remembered of places you like but haven’t been in a while as well.

I think people should stop spending considering the u certainity in the markets and economy.

This is not the time for feel-good charity and small scale philanthropy

We have this in Romania too: https://cadou.ialoc.ro/ :)

Please donate your discretionary income to food banks and other charities, not business owners.

Actually, small business owners absolutely do need money right now. You want them to have the money, too, if you want to have an economy to return to after the pandemic subsides.

Great to see a Bubble-built app! Nocode lets you do things over the course of one day

a better one for SF: https://saveourfaves.org/

“Operation timed out -- app too busy”

Hug of death?

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