Alcohol Discounts & Promotion Stacking in Toast

[DL]

How are other operators handling alcohol discounts in Toast?

We need to allow alcohol items to be discounted for things like Happy Hour, daily specials, and manager comps, but exclude them from stackable promotions such as 25% off coupons, mailers, and other check-level offers.

The challenge is that our 25% off coupon is set up as a stackable discount, and Toast doesn't appear to allow excluding specific menu items from stackable discounts. If we disable Allow Discount on alcohol items, comps and drink specials don't work. If we enable it, alcohol becomes eligible for discounts we'd prefer to block.

Has anyone found a good solution or workaround for this? Looking for best practices from other Toast users.

[au79teahouse]

There is an option to exclude items/groups.

[DL]

Thank you for the feedback, however this option becomes unavailable if you select the Allow with other discounts under the advanced settings of the discount. 

[au79teahouse]

Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing!

I might have a workaround that could work for you. You can set it up as a BOGO discount, which lets you limit the discount to only eligible items or groups and exclude alcohol. BOGO discounts are also stackable.

To make it work, create an item (for example, “25% off coupon”) and add that item to the order whenever a customer presents the coupon. Depending on the ticket size, you may need to increase the quantity of the “eligible get item” so the discount applies correctly. I did a quick test and it seemed to work, though there may be some rare scenarios I didn’t think of.

[au79teahouse]

I read my post again and realized I left out an important part. You will need to add the item (for example, “25% off coupon”) as the "Get Items" section to get it to work.