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So, apparently, Olive Garden did this:

Never Ending Pasta Pass

And this happened:

Sold out immediately

For the tl;dr version: OG already had a Never-Ending Pasta deal (salad, pasta dishes, drinks, all you can eat, $9.99), and, on Sept 8th, they released 1,000 $100 "Pasta Passes" that allow you to strut into any of their restaurants, flash your card, and pig out. The pass is good from Sept 22 to Nov 9 (49 days total). They sold out immediately, and people are already scalping them for over $100.

Let's do the math, here. In order to break even, any consumer buying one of these passes would have to visit the Garden 10 times in 49 days - for this to be a good deal, you'd be going there at least twice a week. The pass covers salad, pasta, and drinks, but not desserts, and I'm betting at least one of those visits, someone's gonna say "What the hey, I'm not paying... tiramisu!". The pass is also only good for one person, and most people aren't going to go to a sit-down restaurant alone.

Olive Garden is going to make so much money this quarter. If they do, I expect the pasta pass will become a regular feature, and other restaurants will follow suit.

And I couldn't be happier about it.

I posted the breakdown of Florenovia's economy on August 8th, and I specifically mentioned a restaurant membership throughout that writeup. Now, I don't seriously think that anyone in OG's board of directors reads my comic, but, you have to admit, the timing on that is incredible. Maybe I was just tapped into the zeitgeist or something. The time is right for restaurant subscriptions!

Let's do the math, here. In order to break even, any consumer buying one of these passes would have to visit the Garden 10 times in 49 days - for this to be a good deal, you'd be going there at least twice a week.

Yeah, I'm not convinced they'll make a ton of money. I would probably eat there 3 or 4 days a week, and possibly multiple times on certain days. Why wouldn't I? Once the money is spent, it'd be silly not to, barring circumstantial problems.

The real kicker is this:

The pass covers salad, pasta, and drinks, but not desserts, and I'm betting at least one of those visits, someone's gonna say "What the hey, I'm not paying... tiramisu!". The pass is also only good for one person, and most people aren't going to go to a sit-down restaurant alone.

It's limited in crucial ways that encourage us to buy more. The thing is, it wouldn't be very good if everybody had the pass. If everyone has the pass, then the restaurant effectively becomes a "free food, just pay for desert" kind of place, with a membership. But if this becomes a large scale thing, plenty of thrifty people (poor people, students, anyone averse to spending money and who isn't averse to pasta) is gonna take full advantage of it (meal plans at universities can cost upwards of $3000, a yearly pasta pass would cost about $800), and the limitation of "your friends still pay" no longer applies, because your friend probably has a pass, too. You're basically depending on people to be too lazy to take proper advantage, or to get sick of your food and not want to take advantage. Neither is ideal.

It's a good idea, but I think the saturation point is low, and too many passes will crash the system.

And now I'm having nightmares about a horrible compromise/clusterfuck of statism and capitalism, where a bipartisan group of politicians agrees that it's the government's obligation to ensure every person has enough food to eat, but they do it by subsidizing fast-food purchases. And Olive Garden becomes the new acceptable minimum standard baseline for nutrition, just like there's a minimum wage for money.

I'm likely not the target market for this kind of thing, but...going more than twice a week to Olive Garden, I'm pretty sure I'd get heartily sick of their food in about...a week.