The local mailers at the Four Queens for September and October included some hotel room nights accompanied by food\/beverage credit. My offer came with $75 worth of such credit and Bonnie\u2019s offer came with $50. You could not get that credit unless you also checked into a hotel room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We weren\u2019t having any visitors and prefer our own bed at home to those at the Four Queens, but we do enjoy eating at Hugo\u2019s Cellar, where the two of us can easily go through $125 in a single meal. So, we both got rooms for the same night, played a fairly significant amount (because we didn\u2019t want to get dinged for picking up a nice complimentary with no play), and made a reservation at Hugo\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The ma\u00eetre d’ recognized us and said he\u2019d work with us on splitting the check so we could get the most value out of the comps. But we still had to charge actual items on each check, so one entr\u00e9e and a glass of wine went on one check and the other entr\u00e9e went on the other. (There were only three items so the number of ways the bill could be split was small.) It was slightly complicated to figure out because food, not alcohol, gets a 20% discount if you belong to Club 55 (I think Sexy Seniors is a better name for the club, but they didn\u2019t ask my opinion), and the tax doesn\u2019t disappear if you charge it to the room. That meant the $50 comp was only worth $46 or so, pre-tax.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since I knew the rules, I worked out how the two checks were to be split before we ordered. This is second nature to me. When we\u2019re at a comped meal for, say, $100, and Bonnie asks me what I\u2019m having, I tell her to make up her own mind and then I\u2019ll order something in order to get the most value out of the comp. Sometimes it means we take food home, but that\u2019s fine with us. It just doesn\u2019t happen that for a $100 comp we order $43 worth and say, \u201cKeep the change.\u201d Almost always, we manage to spend at least $95 from such a comp.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I explained to the waiter what we wanted on which check, he suggested we let him work it out so as to benefit us the most. I told him I was comfortable with my own math and had already figured it out. He seemed a bit miffed that we didn\u2019t let him do it, but he didn\u2019t make a big deal about it. Hugo\u2019s has impeccable service and a waiter starting an argument with a diner would be extremely unusual, but it did appear that he wished we\u2019d let him do the math problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are some arithmetically-competent waiters who could have come up with the same split I did (which I\u2019m positive was optimal). But they\u2019d have to know all the promotions and the policy of the hotel for whether the tax would come off in this situation. Many waiters would have created one bill for what Bonnie consumed, and the rest for me. That would have made one bill about $30 and the other one $90. That was definitely not what we wanted. So, I just did it myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some players, as well as waiters, are either not particularly good at math, or perhaps just don\u2019t want to be bothered with it, so they would sometimes end up paying more in this situation. It\u2019s not a large amount, but over time, it adds up. Money not spent counts just as much as money won. To me it\u2019s not hard and this time I could do it in my head. And a calculator is on my cell phone in case it\u2019s more complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another food comp incident recently happened to a friend of mine who has given me permission to share it with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had a $10 food coupon at one of the Arizona Charlie\u2019s.\u00a0 It was on a Thursday when seniors get a 20% discount on food at the Sourdough Cafe. He wanted a $12 sandwich, to go, which involved a 50\u00a2 surcharge. Okay. That adds up to $12.50. With a 20% discount it comes out to $10 even, which was the size of his comp. No problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he went to pay, he was told he owed 10\u00a2. He didn\u2019t understand. He was positive that 20% of $12.50 was $2.50 so his comp should cover everything. A manager was called, who wisely said that he didn\u2019t want someone\u2019s day ruined over 10\u00a2, so everything ended up copacetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He told me about it as a curiosity. The puzzle is solved once you notice that 10\u00a2 is 20% of 50\u00a2, so obviously the discount doesn\u2019t apply to the to-go surcharge. I suggested that if he was planning on doing the same thing in the future that he should take a dime with him. Getting a manager involved weekly for a lousy 10\u00a2 will kill any chance for a favorable ruling on a bigger matter down the road.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The local mailers at the Four Queens for September and October included some hotel room nights accompanied by food\/beverage credit. My offer came with $75 worth of such credit and Bonnie\u2019s offer came with $50. You could not get that credit unless you also checked into a hotel room. We weren\u2019t having any visitors and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15763,"featured_media":6498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Food Comp Stories by Bob Dancer","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[558],"tags":[561,649],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15763"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}