Gift Vouchers

If anyone has ever tried to get a restaurant gift certificate in England they will have surely run into some, if not a lot of frustration. I just don’t understand how a country can be so behind in the gift certificate business. Maybe it has to do with the pride they take in non-existent customer service? I don’t really pretend to know, but I know it is mind-boggling.
Charles’s and my first encounter with this culture problem was during our first week here. We had a man at Tyndale House who helped us tremendously when buying our car. We wanted to thank him and his wife for their time with a gift certificate to a local restaurant. We were given a couple of suggestions and headed for those restaurants to buy a gift certificate. We quickly learned that the ‘concept’ is actually called a voucher. After repeatedly asking for a gift certificate and then explaining what it was, we were told that it was called a voucher, and no that they didn’t have those.

We trekked onto the next restaurant. Unfortunately, changing our word choice did not help the situation. After asking for a gift voucher, we then were asked again to describe what we meant. The manager of this place was willing to listen and then said he understood the concept and went upstairs. He returned downstairs with a calculator and a menu. He then asked us what we wanted to order for our friends. Order for our friends???? We barely knew these people, how could we know what they would want to eat on any given night. We had no idea if they were vegetarians, liked alcohol, etc. After realizing this was going to be an awkward gift, we thanked the man and said we would need to think about the order before making it. We left and never went back…

We did end up finding a place that gave gift vouchers – Chilli’s – an American owned chain I might add! Even there it was not straight-forward. The manager ended up printing out a homemade gift voucher on the ink jet printer for us. I suspected that a lot of fraud could have occurred with this system, but I abandoned my auditor hat, thanked him and walked home happily that I now had a thank you gift.

You would hope that the country would have progressed in three years in this area, but only recently I have learned that they have not. This time I was on a hunt for a gift voucher to thank someone who had given a talk at Oak Hill. Charles had told me of a restaurant that he was told did gift vouchers so I set out for that restaurant. I walked in and told the man (who was clearly the manager) that I would like to buy a gift voucher. He looked really confused and told me that they didn’t do those. I then told him that my husband had gotten one from there about a year ago. He then hesitated and said yeah but they take a lot of time and they are just really time consuming (a bit redundant, but that is all he could come up with). I felt like yelling, do you realize that I want to give you £50 right now, why are you turning my money away! I felt like spouting out all the statistics of how many gift vouchers are never used and it might even benefit him in that it would be £50 worth of profit with no reduction for the cost of food (if the recipient didn’t redeem it)! Instead I just walked out, in my mind – shaking my head for what a crazy country this is….