Things have been pretty slow the past few weeks at the ole Restaurant-o, so nothing fantastic to blog about. Today though, I had the privilege to read over an e-mail sent to the restaurant by a customer and it inspired me to write a little something.
Of course, the e-mail was not a positive one. No one ever goes out of their way to say nice things about a restaurant, a server, or anything else for that matter. But people will spend ridiculous amounts of time when they are pissed about something- writing e-mails, making phone calls, writing letters to the editor, some self-absorbed people even "blog" about all the day to day nuances of life that piss them off. Anyway, I won't get into exactly what the email said, though if I could get my hands on a copy of it, it would definitely be worth me retyping the entire three pages of it to post on here. Yes, I said three pages... in an email... typed in a small font... with no spacing. See what I mean about people spending a lot of their free time to express their dissatisfaction with something as inconsequential as a cheeseburger?
A Few Interesting Points of the E-mail:
Paragraph 1-2: Describing, in detail, how she and her two co-workers came to walk into our restaurant for lunch. The unacceptable time table for her food and drinks to arrive, she also mentioned that server was polite/nice.
Paragraph 3-6: In depth analysis of the running of our restaurant, steps to remedy the "appalling service" she received and a number of possible training methods the restaurant should implement, targeted at both the front of the house and back of the house staff.
Paragraph 7: Listed specific interactions with server that she deemed to be unacceptable.
One example:
-Customer: Why are you so busy? Why is my food taking 40 minutes?
-Server: Well, it is our opening day, ma'am and we are a brand new restaurant, so things are taking a little longer than normal.
Paragraph 8: Explaining that several other in her party were in "the restaurant industry" at one point in their life and no one thought a 40 minute ticket time was ever acceptable for lunch. And that under no circumstances should a server ever indicate problems in the BOH (see paragraph 7). I guess revealing that it was opening day was some big BOH secret that the server 'let slip.' And what person that has been "in the industry" goes to a restaurant the first month it's open, let alone the first day? They certainly were "in the know."
Paragraph 9-12: Explaining that despite her terrible experience on what was literally our first day open for business, she loved the food so much she decided to come back. This was followed by a description of our "appalling rude" manager explaining to her that, "sorry, we do not take reservations for weekday lunch." What a dick.
I guess my whole point in ranting about this customer's email is that what do people that write nasty emails like that think they will accomplish? Will we change our training program to teach our servers to be "more personable" and to "show the customers more respect" as the woman suggested we do? No. We like our servers to be rude and unprofessional. Will we start taking lunch reservations simply because this customer wrote a whiny email? No. Why would we when we are on a wait on a Monday lunch. Will we all sit around and feel sorry that we offended a customer? No. Will we cower and bemoan the threat of never receiving this customer's business ever, ever again?! Oh let me think... um, no. Will we all the servers and managers sit around after lunch rush, eating our employee meals, passing the email around and ruthlessly tearing it apart, making fun of the customer and later use the contents of the email for fodder for blog about waitressing? Probably.
