GEP
Reviewer
0 helpful votes
Limited benefit, hard to cancel, deceptive pricing claims
I recently re-tried MealPal post-pandemic for a few months. I thought it would be a fit, as I like saving money and I’m not a picky eater. I just cancelled. By the end, I was paying to eat repetitive, minimally discounted (~15%) meals I didn't really want to eat. But I didn't want to lose the money I'd already paid. TL;DR: MealPal shouldn’t be a subscription; it doesn’t work. It should be a program where you buy a block of discounted meals, and can use them in any time period. It also needs greater transparency of what you’re signing up for. 1. Unless you sign up for the $89/month plan (or higher), there’s not remotely enough discount to justify the hassle — for me, it was often just $1.50-$2.50 per meal. For that small discount, you have a host of limitations (e.g. having to pre-book meals and the times you’ll be them at, eating the same 5 meals each week at the same small number of restaurants, the risk of losing a meal you paid for if you have to cancel after 10:30 AM, etc.) Perhaps they just haven’t updated their website sales messaging, it’s currently misleading. At least in Seattle, you aren't getting "Lunch For Less Than $6”. (In general, the meals it’s displaying on the website adjacent to that marketing pitch — from FOB Poke Bar, Sweetgreen, Vinason, etc — cost around $13-15 apiece at the $49/month plan, and perhaps around $9-$12 at the $89/month plan.) I have no idea how one is supposed to get lunch at the pricing shown on their website. Certainly, their service does not provide it. 2. Sooo many icky manipulation tactics to keep you from cancelling. It actually took me quite a bit of work over 2-3 full months to cancel the service, without losing a significant amount of money I’d already spent. - Under the design of their point retention rules, you can't reduce your plan without risking losing meals you’ve already paid for. So I spent one month just stuffing my face with MealPal meals, so that I could lower my monthly service level. (since I had travelled the prior month for a conference, and accumulated a number of meals) - Then I had to spend a month or two on the cheapest ($49/month) plan so that I could actually use up my remaining meals without accumulating so many more that I would never finish them. - When you’re ready to cancel, they don't tell you whether you can keep your meals until the end of the month. This gives the misleading perception that cancellation would cause you to immediately lose the food you've paid for. (strategic ambiguity!) - In cancellation, they also threaten you with a $19 reactivation fee to change your mind (I can’t find any proof this is real — it sure sounds like they are, instead, pleading with prior customers to reactivate instead, via incentives.) I imagine MealPal sees the extra 2-3 months I spent as a “win” for them. But the amount of active work I had to do to cancel this service successfully really flipped my perception of MealPal from a “useful service I’d try again sometime if the restaurants were different” to “kinda icky entity I'm going to avoid doing future business with". 3. Outside of NYC (and maybe SF), the meal options are pretty bad. In Seattle, it’s largely junk food and poke bowls. Among the remaining restaurants, you have some that are decent, but don’t really “get” the model, e.g. one restaurant took about 10 minutes from when I arrived to take my “order", and then sat me at the bar for another 20-30 minutes while they made my to-go MealPal meal. There’s a small handful of remaining decent food places that you can buy from, but they’re literally serving the same 5 meals each week. For me, the main perk of using it in Seattle was a discount at Sweetgreen. However, restaurants generally don’t rotate their menu — with Sweetgreen, it’s literally the same 5 salads. Every week. And, I had to stop what I was doing every Friday night at 8:30 PM to pre-reserve those salads, because they quickly sold out (and plan my week around those meal times). Again, this is all jus
