I went to Olive Garden tonight to join Lynn for his birthday. That much was good, it’s good to have a group get together on someone’s birthday. But…I noticed for the first time the pushing of the wines. Maybe it’s because I’ve only been there with parents before, that they haven’t done it in the past. As soon as we sat
down the waitress explained the wine menu, showed a bottle of their house blah blah with some history of where it was made. This one was actually a blend of various wines – sure to go with anything. Which was good, because if we were intersted in wine, we could get this – since we didn’t yet have menus or any clue
what we wanted to eat and thus what wine would go with it. Alas, no one wanted wine. Oh yeah, only half of us were old enough to have wine anyway, but never mind that. This stuck out to me because I had read reports of it online but never experienced it for myself up to this point.
Then they go around and get drinks, Lynn orders a coke. They find out it’s his birthday and basically pressure him to buy a drink. “Maybe a little rum or whiskey in your Coke? For those of you who don’t know Lynn, he doesn’t drink, which made this even less appropriate. Sorry Lynn if this was supposed to be private information – I doubt it. Anyway, no alcohol was added to the drink… Now we get food, food is good. Lynn’s pizza took forever to bake, which is semi-shitty because it was his birthday, and he was the one who didn’t have food.
At the end of dinner, we discover that they auto-added an 18% “gratuity” because we were a party of 8 or more. I’m not a huge fan of this, but hey, whatever. Steve notices that it says “optional” on the receipt, which is odd, since it’s added in and we weren’t asked about it :-D. So, he asks what the optional means – to which there is no answer. This was not an effort to be cheap, just Steve noticing the detail that his included tip was
optional. Anyway… who cares. Well, in this case it was a bad idea. We were all on separate checks, but the tip was included as if we were one big group. The downside to this for them is that when you are paying for a single dinner, people will generally round up – rarely would someone leave $1.75 tip. But with tip included, they got the exact amount. The moral of the story is that included tips are bad.
1 – Nobody likes seeing that the ‘extra’ that is supposed to reward good service is automatically added.
2 – It got you questioned about the optionality of the tip, which by the reaction, you didn’t like too much.
3 – You actually got less money out of the deal.
Congrats, you got less money and people like you less – I guess on the upside there’s….. well, nothing I guess.
