Gift Cards!

Gift cards! I can’t sleep and I thought I would take the opportunity to express my feelings about gift cards. As you can probably guess, I for the most part despise them. I will explain my top three reasons why gift cards can go to hell, then I will oblige you with an upbeat account of my first great gift card experience.

Top three reasons gift cards can go to hell:

#1. People who tip me on the check total left after they use a $25 gift card.

• I bring you appies, martinis, and cannolis. You run up a tab of $50. Then you proudly hand me your $25 gift card along with your debit to take care of the rest of the bill. Then you tip me $5 and think you left an awesome tip because you tipped $5 on $25. No, you stupid piece of shit. Just because some secretary gave y0u a gift card for Christmas and you don’t have to pay for that food doesn’t mean that I didn’t do my job of ordering and bringing that crap out to you. So regardless of whether or not you are paying for it, I should still be compensated for serving it. So tip according to the entire tab, before your discount.

#2. Expired gift cards.

• I had this lady try to use what she thought was a $50 gift card for her meal. I rang it through and it came out to only be worth $45. That’s because it was expired for a few months, and it decreased a couple dollars in value for every month that she didn’t use it. She played stupid (“I didn’t know it would decrease in value!” Really? Because it says so right on the back of the card…so…) and inevitably swindled my manager into honoring the full value of the card. It was a lot of extra work to re-do things in the computer, and it was right before close. And I found it hilarious that they tipped me the exact same as they did the first time we finalized their tab, even after I had stayed late and gone through all that trouble to save them five fucking bucks.

#3. The coupon mentality.

• People expect special treatment because they have gift cards. I feel like people complain more about their food when they have gift cards because they assume that because it is free for them, it must be free for the restaurant too, so therefore it’s totally cool to return food they deem “not what I was expecting” or “just not to my liking.” So then they get those items comp’d, in addition to whatever gift card discount there is. The restaurant loses money, and I waste my time.

And now, for my great experience. I had a group of ladies come in with gift cards and free birthday dessert passes. Basically, they paid with cash the part of the tab that was left over after the discounts. They handed me the check book, said they didn’t need change, and went on their merry way. They left enough money to cover the tab had there not been a discount – meaning, I got to keep the difference as tip. I think it was like $25, which is awesome.

I don’t even expect people to be extra nice like that – I just expect them to be fair. But when people take the extra steps, it really puts a smile on my face. Maybe that’s the lesson to be learned: That not everyone appreciates the extra effort, the out-of-your-way actions. But when they do – they really do.