In the beginning, the snowballing phenomenon known as “Restaurant Week” was a small-scale local novelty, a promotion run by less than 100 restaurants in New York City. At the time, it was just another eye-catching summer deal: $20 for a three-course business lunch. But that was 25 years ago, and things have long since changed. In 2000, NYC & Company, the organization that runs the program, added a winter version, making it a semiannual event. Then it added dinner. Now in 2017, Restaurant Week blankets the city, with 390 participating restaurants from Harlem to Crown Heights. At the same time, the promotion has swelled far beyond its initial seven-day span: This year, it runs from July 24 to August 18th. In other words, it’s more like Restaurant Month.

Meanwhile, like many New York food trends, the program has caught on elsewhere. Restaurant Week has gone national, even if it sometimes goes by other names. It’s hard to know exactly how many short-term, citywide promotions featuring prix-fixe menus are out there, but similar initiatives have become pro forma in places like Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami. And not just in big cities: You can also find restaurant week-esque events in Winchester, Virginia; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Lompoc, California; and Petoskey, Michigan—to name just a few. Often it feels as though there are more cities with restaurant weeks than without.

And yet, as Restaurant Week has grown, so has the grumbling.

“New York foodies hate Restaurant Week,” declares Business Insider.

“Restaurant weeks hurt restaurants more than they help,” argues VICE.

“This is the week that all the people who never go out to eat all decide to go out to eat,” writes Darron Cardosa, a service industry blogger known as The Bitchy Waiter, in a post called “The hell that is known as ‘Restaurant Week.’” “They infest the restaurants like swarms of locusts, covering every square inch of table space looking for deals. It is a time that we make our money with quantity instead of quality.”

In other words, there’s an abiding sense that Restaurant Week is a despairing carnival of avarice, a free-for-all that puts humanity’s worst instincts on display, almost like the food industry’s answer to Black Friday. A common criticism is that, as diners seek better and better bargains, chefs are forced to cut corners—and, in the end, no one’s getting a good deal.

Which raises the question: If Restaurant Week is really as bad as its detractors say, why do cities keep doing it?