How to Alienate Customers the Old Chicago Way If you care to comment, email me at bradley@wogsland.org with "Political Vloggery" in the Subject line. All links are good on the day of posting, but you know how some tend to die after a while.

Old Chicago has really good pizza and a great selection of beers. Having just discovered the place in the past year I was at first quite excited, especially since they had a Beer Tour. Basically, you get a little card that stores your ID and they track which beers you have drunken. There are little prizes along the way after completing certain numbers of beers. For a guy who made sure he had all the Topps cards listed on the checklist card as a kid, this is pretty exciting. Great idea, poor execution. My first few times using the card was great - a few more beers checked off the list each time. After a little while I got a shirt and we started going to Old Chicago a couple times a month (which is a lot for us). I was seriously stoked about the whole thing. Then came their recent "Oktoberfest" minitour - drink a list of 10 German beers and get a German T-shirt. For a guy who majored in German in college, this just doubled the excitement. Then poor service ruined it. I live in Lincoln, NE, so I can only speak to the restaurants here, but the wait staff at the two locations here seemed to be uninformed about this promotion. A lovely Saturday, sitting outside at the Southpointe location was my first bad experience. We had a nice meal and I ordered several beers on the minitour. When the check came she had left one of the beers off the checklist and forgetten the milestone trinket, a watch, which I had earned and promised to my daughter. Busy with other customers and expecting us to leave it was 15 minutes before she got back to our table and corrected the error. For our next trip we tried the downtown location in the Haymarket. Again, good pizza and good beer. I drank four beers off the minitour. This time when I got my card back he had missed two beers off the checklist. Again, we waited, and waited, and waited to have him fix the error. Did management really not tell any of the servers about the "Oktoberfest" promotion? I know two restaurants is not a statistically significant sample, but I just want to have a nice time out - not conduct a rigorous study of service at Old Chicago restaurants. If you're going to run a promotion it needs to be executed properly or it becomes a demotion for customers like me. Next time we'll just go to Valentino's - good beer and good pizza is not so hard to find.