'I guess you're going to need a to-go box?': Guy exploits "no takeout" Taco Tuesday dine-in loophole

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Aug 14, 2023 6:00 PM EDT

People love tacos… and people love a deal. So, it stands to reason that people would be willing to go to extraordinary lengths in order to get a deal on some tacos. This poster's story is exactly that, with the original poster sharing how they maliciously complied with a restaurant's requirements for their "Taco Tuesday" deal.

It may only be tacos, but you can't help but wonder about the taco ethics of this story. Restaurants and bars run these deals as "dine in only" in order to get butts in seats and mouths drinking alcoholic beverages. Restaurants don't really make much money off of food anyways—with slim margins and intensive labor requirements—there isn't much money to be made… So they'll often run deals on food as a loss-leader to get people there eating and, more importantly, drinking, which is where all the money is to start with. You'll usually even see these deals as advertised as "with purchase of beverage" to avoid the types of pedantic interpretation and malicious compliance that OP pulled in their original post.

Maybe it's on the business for not using stricter terms when advertising this loss-leading deal—maybe OP is in the wrong for the way they went about ordering, although at least it seems that they were decent to the wait staff—hopefully, they tipped as if they were dining in…

See their story as it was originally shared with Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit, along with a selection of reactions from the original thread.