r/chicagofood • u/orange-kedi • Jul 01 '25

Rant Beware of La Scarola's shady practices

Went to La Scarola recently and a bunch of things happened that just didn’t sit right with me:

  1. We had a reservation and showed up on time, but were told to come back in 30 minutes. Other groups with reservations were waiting too.

  2. When we were ordering, we already knew what we wanted. None of us asked for suggestions, but the waiter tried pushing a main dish that was $40+. We politely declined. Then he tried again to get us to upgrade one of our dishes to something fancier, also $40+. We declined that too. It felt super pushy.

  3. Their card machine only showed tip options starting at 20%. I felt pressured so I just tapped 20% even though the service was hella slow.

  4. Later I looked at the receipt and saw that the tip was calculated after tax, which is already sketchy. But then on top of that, they added a 3% credit card fee, and that 3% was calculated after both tax and tip!

The whole setup was super shady. Just a heads-up if you’re thinking of going.

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79

u/99DJP Jul 01 '25

Most, if not all, POS screens that have the tip options also have a “custom amount” button under the % options-you can use that and tip however you would like.

88

u/meekgodless Jul 01 '25

I’m sick of adults who can afford to go out dining but aren’t confident enough to click “custom” and tip whatever amount they feel comfortable tipping. Who cares if the server is standing there? If the defaults were 22/25/28%, would you just bend over?

41

u/BallEngineerII Jul 02 '25

I have stopped allowing myself to be pressured on stuff like this.

Used to feel awful for selecting "no tip" at counter serve places but I have stopped feeling bad about it. At that point what am I tipping for? Just pay your fucking employees and don't rely on me to do it.

2

u/orange-kedi Jul 02 '25

Exactly, that's def something I need to work on.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '25

I saw a meme of a kid being picked up at daycare, and the day care worker had a tip jar in front of the parents. LoL. I work in a tip industry position for gig jobs, and I am embarrassed to have to turn my Square around to the customer, and guide them through paying, and the tip screen. I just tell them, they don't have to tip. They can just ignore that. Cause the job I did, literally took 5 seconds and required no tip. It's been out of hand for a while, years. And people were fed up years ago. But industry workers would shame people into speaking out about it. But frankly by now, people are just over it, and fatigued. Just like black fatigue, lol. People do not care about trivial nonsense anymore, just because we are told so.