Restaurant Rip Off

Restaurant Rip Off 

There are those that will come into a restaurant with what seems like a determination to “beat the house” so to speak .   To find a loop hole and yank on it knowing the restaurant will bend, there by giving the guest what they want.  It would be rude to tell a person they are cheap so we simply won’t do it.   Instead, we give in and let demands run about in dining establishments.   In this business, it’s certainly not true that the customer is always right, on the contrary, they are almost always wrong but the customer can almost always get what they want.  And they have figured that out.  Some pull simple rip offs like letting their teenagers order  off the kids menu knowing they are well past the age of twelve.  Few take a more brazen approach and ask their server blatantly to slip them something extra on the side for an extra tip.  This happened the other night with one of my coworkers.  A man had ordered gourmet cheese dip for he and his family.   After finishing he slyly asked my coworker if he could bring him another one on the slide.  He told my friend that it would help his tip if he could make it happen.  The cost of the dip is $9 so we can assume that if Mr. Cheese Dip didn’t want to pay the $9 for the dip, then he wasn’t going to give my server even $9 extra on a 20% tip to risk unemployment to get him a free cheese dip.  The rest of the dinner went off without  a hitch until the end of the service when my friend was cleaning his table and realized what Mr. Cheese Dip left him and why.  The tip was $15 on a $175 check.  On the bottom he signed his new nickname “Cheese Dip” letting my friend know that the reason for his poor tipping percentage.  Only because my friend would not give him a free cheese dip.  Twenty percent of a $175 check is $35.  Mr.  Cheese Dip left $20 less than that only leaving a little less than 9% of the check total.  If you have read my previous posts then you know we pay a 3% tip share.  It is 3% of total sales not tips so my friend had to pay $5.25 back to the restaurant for this table.  So he kept less than $9 on a table that should have been much more profitable for him had Mr. Cheese Dip not had such a unflattering sense of entitlement for his name sake.   Another one of my friends came up to me the other day with tears of frustration from a table that was playing the “loop hole” game at her table.  Here’s the set up.  It’s a man, woman and teen.  The couple says that they are going to order a “soup and salad” combo and split it.  She having the salad and he the soup.  This cost $11.  If they had ordered it separately then his soup would be $5 and her salad $9 totaling $14.  This couple found a $3 loop hole and they took advantage of it.  They also ordered a “child cheeseburger” for a girl that was at least 15 years old.   While a child cheeseburger is only $5 compared to $10 it is exactly the same size as the $10 burger.  It is only sold at a discounted price on the children’s menu for those 12 and under.  When the bill was brought the lady complained about her teenagers drink being itemized as soft drinks were free with items off the children’s menu.  Anther $2.50.  This lady found anther $2.50 loop hole to shave down the price of her bill.  By exploiting a restaurants weak spots, she was able to save $10.50 off her bill.  But what she also did was whittle another $2.10 off of the tip by bringing her check average down.  Ordering all of this directly to the woman that she was pick pocketing that extra $2.10 from,  there by earning her nick name “Polly Pick Pocket.”  There are other Polly Pick Pocket’s in this world.  One of my coworkers told me about a friend she has whose intentions are to get her entire meal paid for every time she goes out  to eat simply by complaining.  These rip off artists have found a way to skim off the top when they go out to eat.  But it doesn’t make them savvy, it only makes them cheap.  The moral of the story, don’t grow up to be like Mr. Cheese Dip or Polly Pick Pocket.  If you already are one, it’s time to make a change.