Dawn, Angie, and I went to dinner at a new restaurant up in Castleton last night, the Blue Cat Cafe. The menu was mostly pasta dishes, which is my kind of menu, and the hot wings appetizer was Bourbon Hot Wings, so that was nice too. The eggplant parm I got was decent — not as good as mine, but decent. The beer selection was okay: a few Vermont microbrews on tap and the major domestics in bottle. And the ceiling of the place was really cool: painted midnight blue with little twinkly lights arranged like the night sky, and every few minutes, a little burst of light would “streak” across the sky like a comet or a shooting star; as the sun went down, they lowered the lighting in the place and turned on these blue ceiling lights that made the inside similar to the twilight going on outside. Dawn didn’t seem too impressed, but I liked the effort.
But the point of this post is not a restaurant review, not because the place doesn’t deserve it, but because there’s a very slim chance that any of you are going to find yourselves in Castleton, Vermont anytime soon.
The point of this post is to discuss what happened at the end of the meal, when the check came. At the bottom of the check, printed out digitally like the rest of the check (i.e., it is part of the system, not something the waitress did), there was a little note that told you how much you should tip…actually, there were two notes: one told you how much to leave if you usually tip 15% and another if you like to tip 20%.
Part of me likes the idea, because it’s a rare occurrence when I’m out to dinner and someone DOESN’T ask what 15% of X is (or 20%, as the case may be). But then there’s a whole other part of me that’s like, “C’mon…that’s a little too much.” It made me feel like I was being forced to leave a tip. Now, I know we’ve had this conversation before on one of Sam’s posts, and I don’t want to get into the whole “the tip game is a racket” thing, but the fact that this restaurant prints on the bottom of their receipt, “If you would like to tip 15%, you should leave X. If you wold like to tip 20%, you should leave Y” really kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
And hey, if you can’t blog about being rubbed the wrong way, what the hell’s the point of this thing?
4 Comments
If you can not figure out what 20% of a number is then I guess that is a good thing to put there to help a perosn out. Then again if you can’t figure out what 20% of a number is…..
I agree - it might be “helpful” to some people to show what the tip “should” be BUT people should never be forced to tip (although you’d better have a damn good reason not to if you’re with me :)) - I think when it shows the tip amounts on the bottom of the receipt, it cheapens the place too, like saying that their customers couldn’t figure it out on their own!
The Blue Cat Bistro uses a Credit Card Processing Company. They issue the business a Credit Machine to process credit sales. The Machine has built in software that prints your name, a small identifiable part of the credit number and anything else the credit card company think is relative to a food service sale (ie a table at the bottom of the receipt to help the consumer calculate a tip.) The Blue Cat has no control over the content of a credit card receipt and therefore probably shouldn’t be associated with it. Perhaps these blogger’s time would be better spent commenting on the “Why am I angry at the world?” and “Where did all my time go?” blog site.
Fair point. Blue Cat is not to blame.
As far as your final sentence, however, I think a quick survey of the site will show you that I blog pretty much about anything I can think of that day, including, once in a while, wondering where all of my time has gone.
And as I said above, “hey, if you can’t blog about being rubbed the wrong way, what the hell’s the point of this thing?”