Many businesses out there provide crappy service. Of those, many take their bad service for granted—or worse, they take pride in it.
(I imagine the airline industry takes pride in being able to screw its customers; it’s the only way I can explain the never-ending nickel-and-dime stuff they do.)
It’s bad strategy: eventually, when you provide crappy service, it does bite you in the ass.
Even when you think the business is a lock.
Take last night for example.
I was in Aspen last night, having dinner with a friend and a four of his coworkers. As there were six of us, the tip was automatically included on our bill. 20%.
Maybe that’s why our waiter thought he could take us for granted? He was slow, he got drink orders wrong, he brought our food out at weird times, and he even left us sitting with the check for 15 minutes after he saw us put our credit cards down—we couldn’t even pay! Worst of all, his attitude was blase when we brought issues to his attention; he left each of us with the distinct impression that he did not care.
And why should he? Our tab ran into the hundreds of dollars, and his 20% was fixed. Easy money!
Or so he thought.
I took our bill to the restaurant’s manager, told him what was happening, and asked him to remove the gratuity from the bill. Which he did.
Leaving quite a big hole in our server’s night.
Now, let’s send a message to organizations that think they can provide crappy service with impunity. Answer this: when have you had a chance to stick it to someone who tried providing you with bad service when they thought they could get away with it?
Did you walk out?
Return an empty box?
Tell 10 people?
Blast the company on Yelp?
What did you do?
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Blogged, discontinued my business relationship with the establishment, and started my next business relationship with the new replacement by saying, “Let me tell you why I just left _____. I’m hoping you can do better.”
But I’m kind of an asshole that way.
I had a very similar situation the other day when my mother and I went to a restaurant. In our situation, gratuity was not added to our bill, though. The waitress walked away from us to get a regular coffee and tell him about the specials, started talking to someone in the middle of our order, didn’t ask us if we needed anything or how things were, talked at the hostess table for an extended period of time about her lack of child care, and stood in the back with the manager talking about us. To top this off, the manager left to go to a hair appointment despite seeing clearly that we were writing out a complaint!
We left the complaint with a cook who was happy to help us (and happy we liked his food!), NO TIP, and currently, I am playing phone tag with the restaurant’s owner.
@Brandi—That’s super bad news. It’s a double-whammy of badness when bad service providers are merely emulating their checked-out managers. I have 2 friends with successful restaurant businesses; they’d CRINGE at the idea of a manager ducking out for personal reasons when a customer issue needed resolution.