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

givelocal.co

11–20 of 58 posts

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

#11
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.

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

#12
post #6

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.

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

#13
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).

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

#14
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.

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

#15

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.

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

#16
post #8
post #7

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 learni…

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.

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

#17

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 refle…

> 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.

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