Check out how good your credit card limit is by paying $54,896 for dinner out! Dez Bryant did--could you?

It's a right of passage for all consumers: can you pay the bill?

At some point in our lives we've all been in situations that we feel are dicey when it comes to money, when we wonder if we'll have enough money in strange and public places:  Will the money I have in my pocket be enough to pay for the date?  Will my credit card be declined when I'm entertaining business clients? What if the bill is more than I can afford?  This is especially the case for young guys trying to impress a date by going out on the town in a big way, but fundamentally flirting with economic disaster and tempting fate to embarrass them by not being able to pay the tab!  

Dez Bryant, rookie wide receiver on the Dallas Cowboys knows the feeling.  For failing to acknowledge his ritual dues during training camp--by not carrying the shoulder pads of an senior team member, fellow wide receiver Roy Williams, he ended up paying a dear price.  

When the faux pas first occurred--when Mr. Bryant failed to pass his hazing test--he apologized to Mr. Williams, saying that he wasn't aware of the team tradition and that he was sorry; Mr. Williams accepted the apology, but hasten to add that Mr. Bryant would have to make-up for the mistake by paying for dinner sometime in the future.  Mr. Bryant agreed.

It's called living large.

That sometime was last Monday evening when Mr. Williams invited the entire team--about 50 people--to join Mr. Bryant and him when they went out to dinner at a place called Pappa's Steakhouse in Dallas.  When the evening was over and the waiter brought the check to Mr. Bryant--the bill was the better part of $55,000--yes, you read it right--that would be the number "55," followed by three zeros!  Presuming he tipped 20%, the billed amounted to about $900 per person at the event--all to be paid for, actually paid for indeed, by Mr. Bryant!  

Now what I want to know is this: who has a credit card that's got that kind of limit?  That's some card!  Hell, that's some credit limit--you could by a couple of new cars for that amount...all by presenting your credit card!  Also, you have to wonder how much Mr. Bryant enjoyed the evening, when he saw unopened bottles of expensive wine costing up to $900 a piece being ordered only to be taken home, when almost nothing on the menu had not been ordered up many times over.  

Consuming can be fun and scarey all at the same time.

The story--reported on ESPN-Dallas and Yahoo Sports--brings back in vivid technicolor those dicey dates when as a young, fledgling consumer--buying conspicuously at the edge of what he could afford--I ran the real risk of being horribly embarrassed in front of someone I desperately wanted to impress.  I'm glad to say it never happened, but that's not to say I wasn't worried.  

So I guess you could say I have something in common with Mr. Bryant.  We both lived large and we each ended up being able to pay the price when the bill was presented, thank you very much!  In full disclosure, however, there was a difference between us:  I temped economic ruin; Mr. Bryant simply paid about 7/10ths of one percent of his first year's salary as a Cowboy football player--with bonus, he's getting $8,300,000.  For him it was a relatively small amount; I pretty much paid all I'd made at the time.

But I still think I know the feeling he had when he got the first glimpse of that big bill.  It's one of the rituals of becoming a full-fledged consumer that we all go through!  Just the price tag is different!  
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Comments

[Kathy]

Do you think he paid cash?