Memberships: for the place you already go to

Most people have one place they go to far more than they would admit. The coffee four mornings a week, the Thursday dinner, the bakery on Saturdays.

A membership is for that one. It is not a discount card for places you might visit; it is a standing arrangement with somewhere you already treat as yours.

What you get

Each place designs its own, and the good ones combine two things: something small you use constantly, and something you could not otherwise buy.

• Credit that tops up every month — pay €40, get €45 to spend
• A standing discount, on everything or on part of the menu
• Something free — a coffee a day, a glass with dinner
• Priority booking, or deposits waived
• Member-only nights, which is the part people actually talk about

Whether it is worth it

There is one honest test, and it is easy to apply: does it pay for itself at the rate you already go?

If yes, it is a good membership. If you would have to start going more often to break even, it is a membership designed to change your behaviour rather than to reward it, and those are the ones people quietly resent after two months.

Work it out on your actual last month, not your intended next one.

Pausing rather than cancelling

Most places let you pause.

Going away for the summer, a tight January, a stretch where you are not around — pausing keeps your standing and stops the money. It is almost always better than cancelling, because cancelling means starting again.

Sharing one

Where a place offers a family plan, a household can be on one membership.

It is a small thing that makes a large difference to whether a membership is worth having: a couple who both eat somewhere regularly should not need two, and a place that insists on two usually ends up selling none.

Several places, one membership

Some groups of independent places in the same area run a shared membership.

That is frequently much better value than a card for one of them, for a simple reason: the worth of a membership depends on how often you can use it, and no single place is somewhere you go often enough on its own. Six good places within walking distance is a different proposition.

Member-only nights

The part that is hardest to value and often the best bit.

A supper club, a tasting, a night the place closes to everybody else — these are the things a membership buys that money alone cannot, because they are capped and members get them first. A place with forty members can run something for forty people that would not work as a public event.

It is also the reason a membership survives past the point where somebody has worked out the arithmetic on the credit.

The good ones are small and frequent rather than grand and annual: a monthly table nobody else can book beats one big night a year, because the first is a reason to keep paying and the second is a reason to join in November and cancel in December.

The first 14 days

If you join and think better of it within 14 days, having used none of the benefits, you get that first period refunded in full and automatically.

That is more generous than the law strictly requires. It is deliberate: working out what half a month of a membership was worth is a judgement, and a refund you have to negotiate is not much of a right.

What else to look at

• Rewards — free, and the place to start before paying monthly
• Events — including the member-only ones
• Vouchers and gifts — money up front without the commitment
• Reservations — where priority booking applies