Quote:
Originally Posted by bilcon
Trashing a restaurant on a public forum is a really bad idea. Perhaps if you got off your phone and asked her a little earlier about your food, it would have come sooner. People make mistakes.
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Indeed they do. But often it is how the service personnel react AFTER the incident that can either assure that the customer comes back, or if they avoid the place like the plague.
Case in point: some years (quite a few, come to think of it) My wife and I were dining at a buffet restaurant in Mankato, Minnesota. I hit the dessert bar after dinner for some ice cream, which I intended to top off with some strawberry sauce which was dispensed from one of a row of plungers. I pressed the plunger, but nothing: appeared to be stuck. A littler harder--still nothing. A third time--and SPLOOOOSH! The dispenser tip popped off and slathered me in strawberry sauce from my left shoulder down to right mid-thigh. A busser saw what happened and immediately called the manager, who hurried over and ushered my wife and I out of the immediate presence of other diners. He was hugely apologetic. "I'm SO sorry about what happened. We thought we had that thing fixed" etc., etc. He then gave my wife and I SIX free passes to the buffet, plus $50 in cash to buy a new shirt and slacks, which we bought on our way out of town, as J.C. Penney as I recall. Had the manager just tried to brush the incident off, he would have lost two customers. As it was, with the way he handled it, he not only assured that we'd be back but that word-of-mouth (no discussion boards back then) would also get him some positive publicity, which it did: I'm not shy about expressing opinions.
Amusing aside: we walked into J.C. Penney and the clerk at one of the registers gasped in amazement at my appearance. "It's OK", I told her, "The other guy looks worse".