POULSBO — There wasn’t anything unusual about the discount, Sogno DiVino co-owner Rob Scott said Friday.
“When a family’s children have been well behaved, we always say something — ‘We took care of your desserts,’ ‘We really want to thank you,’ ” he said. “This time we wrote it down, and [the customer] put it on her Facebook page.”
To Scott, the ensuing response was surprising.
“KOMO 4 is here right now with their cameras. It’s been nuts,” said Scott, who with his wife Angela owns and operates the Italian restaurant in downtown Poulsbo. Earlier in the day, he was interviewed by the Associated Press. He was to be interviewed by Washington, D.C. media on Saturday.
In case you missed it: Laura King of Kingston, her husband and their three children had dinner at Sogno di Vino on Feb. 1. The children’s behavior impressed the server, who gave the family $4 off their bill and noted it as a “well-behaved kids” discount on the receipt. King appreciated the gesture, photographed it and posted it on her Facebook page. A friend saw it and posted it to Reddit. The posting went viral, making its way across the Internet faster than sugar browns on a creme brulee.
The story was picked up Yahoo News, Huffington Post, The Today Show, and numerous other print, TV and online media.
Why all the reaction to a $4 discount on a dinner check? “Part of it had to do with that Applebee’s deal,” Scott theorized, referencing the story about the pastor who protested an automatic 18 percent gratuity by writing on her meal receipt, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18.” A waitress posted the receipt online and was fired, sparking a petition drive to get her reinstated.
There have been other stories recently: In January, a Papa John’s employee in Manhattan was fired after typing a racist comment about a customer on a receipt. In October, a customer at a bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood stiffed his waitress and wrote a comment about her weight on the receipt.
In contrast, “This is a good news story, rather than a bad news story,” Scott said.
Scott said he’s read online comments that question the rewarding of good behavior with discounts: some commenters have asked, “Are you going to start charging for bad behavior?”
But overall, “it’s been very well received,” Scott said. “People have been coming in and saying, ‘I read about you.’ ”
Here are some of the media outlets that have carried the story:
— ABC News
— Shine
— Today
