“Is it normal for a restaurant to have 100+ customer credit cards stockpiled?”

Photo by PoPville flickr user washingtonydc

“Dear PoPville,

Last week, a few of us went to Provision 14 for happy hour. Only three beers over 90 minutes, so definitely a tame night. I went to close out a different bartender from who had helped us earlier handed me the receipt but I cannot remember if he gave me my card back but when we left, the sleeve had no credit card (verified by someone else in our party).

I noticed my credit card wasn’t in my wallet so I just assumed the bartender never gave it back. I called them a few minutes after 5pm and was put on hold a couple times and the hostess asked me a couple times to say and spell my name. She said “no sorry” and hung up. I decided to walk over and ask in person. Mind you, there are zero people in the restaurant at this time. I gave her my ID and she goes “Oh i think you just called but this isn’t the name you gave me.” She whips out a box of maybe 100 credit cards that had been left. I was astonished and appalled that so many cards had been “left.” After looking in two sections at about 3 different cards, she goes “sorry, I looked everywhere and it’s not here. You probably dropped it.”

Not only was she rude and very flippant on even trying to help. I get that this is a sticky situation, but a little effort could have gone a long way.

I know that I can’t ask to look, but the fact that they made such little effort to look can only raise some suspicion that have those 100+ credit cards really been left behind? Is that normal for a restaurant to have that many stockpiled?”