Many local restaurants near Marietta and around Cobb County offer budget-friendly dining discounts to seniors. But often, those discounts aren’t listed on the menu or openly promoted in the restaurants, more of an “in-the-know” deal than a general benefit.
There’s help available for AARP members, with the organization’s deal-finding dining database. But once again, you have to know where to look or be willing to explore in order to find these budgeting bargains before heading to your favorite restaurant. And the good news is that once you know the secrets, you can apply them for any location while visiting or traveling.
We visited the AARP website and the AARP NOW app as the first step in satisfying our hungry hankerings. After logging in with our membership credentials, we began our search of this treasure trove for treats. But on both the website and app, we were overwhelmed with information, but it wasn’t the discounts we were looking for.
To find those, we had to click on a benefits area in the app, then selected “categories” to find restaurants. On the website, that translated to a membership and benefits tab on the top navigation area, then scrolling down the left hand navigation bar to find a restaurants option.
Even after selecting restaurants, we weren’t in the exact location. That’s because the restaurant selection presents a list of all national chains that offer AARP dining discounts. We counted more than 20 options. Some, like Auntie Anne’s, Carraba’s, Cinnabon, McAllister’s, Moe’s and Outback, offer locations in and around Cobb County.
Once again looking around the pages, we finally found an option for “Coupons for Local Restaurants.” But we were still two clicks away from our payoff.
Finally, we landed on app and web pages that feature more than 40 restaurants with real Cobb County locations, including several that were true local restaurants run by community members. And we loved some of the bargains we found.
For example, West Cobb Diner offers a 25% discount, with savings up to $25. That’s a perfect way to enjoy their huge portions, which always makes multiple meals for us in our to-go box.
Several other local places offer 10, 20 and 25% off deals, too. And while we’re not a familiar with some of them, those offers may be a great reason to try them out soon.
Plus, there are a number of BOGO-type discounts for lunch and dinner meals.
And after digging down deep into the navigation, we did find a shortcut — at least for the website. And we’ve bookmarked the site since it includes a location search function to find dining discounts from virtually any location. Check out this link for the location, and be sure to bookmark it for your future reference, too. When we tweaked the locator to include restaurants within 10 miles of Marietta, we turned up 45 locations offering senior discounts.
