There are few days in which the voracious jaws of capitalism don’t eagerly devour your limbs and grind your bones to a profitable (for a select few) powder. One of those days is your birthday.
🎵 Happy happy birthday, may all your dreams come true / Happy happy birthday here’s something free from us to you 🎵
Perhaps it is a uniquely-named scoop of ice cream (Ben & Jerry’s), a miniature and easy-to-lose beauty product (mine was a lipgloss from Sephora in a shade deemed “pistachio” despite being pale pink), or the empowering choice of pita chips, drink, or dessert (Cava)1. Whatever the gift may be, it is a business’ way of saying “I see you and thank you for being born (to consume).”
The annoying part of birthday treats is that you often have to join a hoard of different loyalty programs to get them, creating multiple different logins and wasting precious time of your newly acquired year of life.
If only there were a way to have them all in one place in as few steps as possible… But, wait – there is!
Toast is a point of sale system that many restaurants use to allow people to place online orders and view their menus. It’s also utilized by those same restaurants to provide loyalty programs for their customers.
With this, the Toast app, not to be confused with my cat who shares the same name, allows you to input your birthday, see what nearby restaurants offer loyalty programs, join them with a single click, and let the bounty roll in during your birthday month.
Toast the cat (left), Toast the app (right)
Most of the restaurants near me offered a $5 birthday reward, but others gave me $10 or $15 in total because they also provided a sign-up bonus when joining their loyalty program.
A few things to make note of before starting your Toast birthday goodie collection:
Use a trash e-mail
You may be signing up for the birthday freebies in a single app, but your information is still going to each individual restaurant, so you’ll become a part of their various customer registries and yes, be getting welcome emails (as well as future “don’t you want to come and eat here?” emails) until you unsubscribe. To spare yourself, use an email address you’ve deemed for anything unimportant when you make an account with Toast.
You may also want to use a google number or a number you don’t care about when you sign up. Toast alerts you on a single text chain (rather than a million individual ones) when you join each restaurant’s loyalty program, but I’m guessing you’re not trying to receive more ignorable texts. Whatever email and phone number you choose, just make sure you aren’t so far removed from them that you can’t access them.
If signing up for Toast at the end of your actual birthday month, say your birthday is the following month
The birthday rewards generally have an expiration date of the last day of your birthday month. This means that if you have a September birthday and join on September 28th, you’ll potentially limit yourself to a single day or only hours to redeem them before they expire. Additionally, there is usually a 24-hour or less period from enrolling in each loyalty program for its rewards to load to your account, so the time to use your gifted money is further dwindled. Instead, maximize your redemption period by making your birthday the following month in the app (and remembering what that “birthdate” is).
Double check the expiration dates
Some restaurants have birthday offers that are solely valid on the day of your birth. I encountered this at only a few places, but it was a bummer to discover that the $5 to $10 I thought was stashed in my Toast wallet for the entire month was instead a celebratory monetary value to appear next year.
🎵 Happy happy birthday, from all of us to you / Happy happy birthday Toast is how we say “woo-hoo!” 🎵
Congratulations! Not only were you born, but you now have a way to quickly receive and compile restaurant birthday freebies (from the restaurants that use Toast). That is something! 🥳
- Ben & Jerry’s, Sephora, and Cava do not use Toast, but that’s why I mentioned them separately – if you want them, have at ‘em by becoming a member of their individual loyalty programs. ↩︎
