How we verify merchants
A published deal or article is only as useful as the merchant, store, and coupon facts underneath it. This page is the verification side of the same process described in the editorial guidelines: writers visit every venue, order, and pay the bill themselves, with no free meals and no advance notice; an editor checks the piece before it publishes; and every article lists its sources and the date it was last verified. The people accountable for that check are on the editorial team page.
Coupon and merchant approval
A coupon does not go live because a merchant submitted it. It moves through an approval path: draft, pending review, under review, then approved or rejected, or sent back for revision. Only an approved coupon can become active. Rejected and needs-revision coupons stay off the public site until the facts in the listing — offer, price, validity, and store — match what the reviewer accepted. When a coupon later expires, it leaves the active set rather than remaining on the hub as a live offer.
Store and merchant listings are checked against the same standard. The public page should describe a real location a customer can visit, with the offer that was approved, not a placeholder or an outdated promotion. If the submitted copy and the venue do not match, the listing stays in review instead of being published.
The venue visit
Editorial verification of a venue is a visit, not a phone call. The writer orders and pays. The merchant is not tipped off in advance and does not comp the meal. That is how we confirm that the store exists, that it is open to walk-in customers, and that the published coupon corresponds to something a paying guest can actually redeem. Notes, receipts, and on-site photos from that visit are the original materials for the article; they are not replaced by a merchant-supplied write-up.
Mark Joseph Mantele, the supervising editor, checks the resulting draft before it publishes. Atty. Jansen Bernardo, Legal Counsel, reviews articles before publication — he is the reviewedBy Person on article structured data. Those two reviews sit on top of the approval path for the coupon itself: a deal can be commercially approved and still be held if the reporting around it is not ready.
After it is published
Publication is not the last look. Every article carries the date it was last verified, so a reader can see when the facts were last walked against the venue and the live coupon. If a fact later proves wrong — a price, an address, an offer window, a closed store — the correction is logged in the article, not silently overwritten. The corrections policy covers how that log works and how to tell us.