Not really a gift for everyone…

In the past couple years, without fail, news stations every Christmas discuss the rising trend of people giving gift cards as presents, along with the pros and cons of giving gift cards. They usually make the same arguments every year that you should be careful and and people still give them. Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with gift cards. I give gift cards as presents on holidays. It’s a fantastic present to get someone for whom you don’t know how to shop. If you know their favorite restaurant, or store, just give them a gift card and they can go spend it however they like. Of course, if you don’t know their favorite places, then you might want to ask or at least pay attention because that’s really what friends do, right? Imagine giving a co-worker a gift card to Home Depot, when they spend most of their time shopping at Yankee Candle. If you had been an observant friend, then you wouldn’t piss them off. Really, can you imagine someone giving you a gift card to a store you don’t shop at? It’s annoying.

Restaurants love gift cards. Well, let me be more specific: restaurant owners love gift cards. It’s automatic money. It’s basically saying “I’m going to MAKE my friend come to your restaurant and use this gift card, because I’ve already given you $50 (or $100).” The best thing about it is that when people have a $50 gift card, they’re more inclined to spend a little more money. We’ll see a pretty large influx of gift cards in the first three months of the year (if you don’t know why this is, think about it for a few minutes then read on – I’ll wait). I, along with every other waiter in the business, hate seeing gift cards. Why, you ask? Well, if I gave you a nice easy answer, this would be a short blog post and you wouldn’t get the full effect.

People giving gift cards to friends and family for holidays will often bring in the “wrong clientele” to our fine dining restaurant; someone who normally would never eat there because it’s so expensive. So, a gift card gives them an opportunity to dine at a restaurant that’s well above their budget. Generally, these riffraff are easy to spot because of the clothes they wear, their obvious lack of experience dining at a fine restaurant, and the usual deer-caught-in-headlights look they get when you try to explain the specials for the evening. Of course, this “holiday-benefiting” clientele will spend every dollar of that gift card and often no more. I’ve had a co-worker get a couple of this kind of clientele come in with a $100 gift card, order $98.90 worth of food and leave her the gift card on the table and walk out. I’m sorry, but this is completely unacceptable.

As I’ve said before, everything a waiter does is so that you tip more. We’ll upsell you a salad, dessert or coffee for the purpose of raising your ticket prices so that you’ll be inclined to tip more. The problem with the gift cards for us (and a good thing for you) is that it’s a huge deduction in what is charged to your credit card. Now, this is different if say, your gift card is $100 and you only spend $40. What that means is that when you go to sign your check and your original bill is $120 and you paid with a credit card and a $100 gift card, the only thing that will come back on your credit card slip is $20. Customers will often see that $20 on their credit card slip and think a four dollar tip is sufficient, but not when your bill was originally $120! Especially when we go through the extra effort of upselling you and taking extra care of you because your ticket was so high. Ultimately, we only received a four dollar tip on a $120 bill, which isn’t even CLOSE to being enough, especially with needing to tip-out the support staff. If you, as a customer come into a restaurant with a gift card, make sure that you pay attention to the original total of the bill before giving your tip. I know it might look strange to tip $24 when your credit card is only charged $20, but remember your original bill was $120 and we did $120 worth of work.

The worst atrocity of this kind of instance happened to a co-worker of mine a couple months ago and was one of the reasons he quit. He had a table of “wrong clientele” come in one night and order the most expensive items on the menu. Steak and Lobsters, mixed drinks, frozen margaritas, desserts, the whole nine yards. Between three people, their bill ended up being somewhere above $320. They were running my co-worker ragged, back and forth from the kitchen, etc. When he drops the bill, they give him four gift cards. They tell him that two of them are $100, and two are $50. He goes to the bartender to give her the gift cards to ring up, and one of the $50 gift cards is actually empty! He brings the check back, with $70 left to be paid. These people complained, calling my co-worker a liar saying that they knew the money was on the card, and even going to talk to the bartender themselves. Apparently, they explained that they had bought the $50 gift card from some thug on the street for $20. They continued to complain, and finally paid the $70 or so left on the ticket, and left a tip of a whopping SIX dollars. That’s SIX dollars on a $320 check. That’s a 1.8% tip.

So, they can be good for you, but remember, more often than not they’re bad for us. It’s just saddening that this happens a lot more than it should.