TGI Fridays Offering Endless Appetizers, Would Prefer If You Don’t Share With Friends

TGI Fridays is throwing down the all-you-can-eat gauntlet with a new “Endless Appetizers” promotion this summer — but don’t think that means you and your friends can gorge together.

Customers pay $10 per type of appetizer — loaded baked potato skins, buffalo wings, mozzarella sticks, etc — and then get unlimited refills. Sharing is discouraged, but it’s not like servers are going to go around smacking food out of your hands.

“At the end of the day, our servers aren’t policemen,” Brian Gies, chief marketing officer tells USA Today. “We’re not going to slap someone’s hand if they reach over and share someone else’s mozzarella sticks.”

Although there will probably be those bad consumers who make us all look bad, at least, in the eyes of a restaurant owner, making the whole thing a risky bet for TGI Fridays.

“The risk comes when a crowd of six, or more, decides to get together and pool their resources, all ordering one item and sharing,” a hospitality professor says in pointing out the obvious thing that most people would do. “Then it is easy to predict that everyone will order at least six refills each, with plates being passed around.”

Gies seems relaxed about it though, saying that didn’t happen that often during a test of the promo in Cincinnati this year.

“No one should be embarrassed for coming into Fridays and ordering whatever they want to order,” he says. “They will not be bawled out. There will be no policing or hand-slapping.”

TGI Fridays takes a chance on ‘endless’ appetizers [USA Today]

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