Because the customer is always right.
Everything else is allowed except that the customer hit the waiter.
Tip
- Thread starter assari
- Start date
Because the customer is always right.
Everything else is allowed except that the customer hit the waiter.
its that kind of crap that would bring out the psychotic in me. i would have stopped talking all together and just stared menacingly and when she left i would have called out "im on break" and followed her for hour or two.
I'll nearly always tip in a restaurant, unless it's a buffet style where you aren't waited on, because if you receive poor service it gives you a chance to make the statement by just leaving what the bill says. Arguably it shouldn't be that case, you should only tip if you think you've received a good service, not because social norms/convention says you should. Over here I never get the feeling anyone is scratching to get by if they're working that kind of job. Most waiters/waitresses I encounter are students.
Taxi drivers I usually add a couple of quid on and don't know why, but often it's a genuine "you've really helped me out here" if I didn't have a lift or know where I was going. Food delivery men usually get a solitary £1 from me. Pay for the food, and then "here's a pound for yourself." Relatively speaking, they've done fuck all, I'm just being nice for the sake of it. Most of my friends don't even bother with that.
I always tip my escort. Even though I receive exactly what "the price" is for, I always give her more because I enjoy it so much. Not including if I take her to the cinema or out for a meal.
I'm moving to Tokyo in the summer and out there, there is no tipping. You OFFEND them if you offer them money. They're doing their job and are paid to do the best work they can, and as such it would be dishonourable to accept further payment. How awesome is that?
:rubbel:
Taxi drivers I usually add a couple of quid on and don't know why, but often it's a genuine "you've really helped me out here" if I didn't have a lift or know where I was going. Food delivery men usually get a solitary £1 from me. Pay for the food, and then "here's a pound for yourself." Relatively speaking, they've done fuck all, I'm just being nice for the sake of it. Most of my friends don't even bother with that.
I always tip my escort. Even though I receive exactly what "the price" is for, I always give her more because I enjoy it so much. Not including if I take her to the cinema or out for a meal.
I'm moving to Tokyo in the summer and out there, there is no tipping. You OFFEND them if you offer them money. They're doing their job and are paid to do the best work they can, and as such it would be dishonourable to accept further payment. How awesome is that?
:rubbel:
So damn true but I think we're getting off topic now
Because as a society we've decided to coddle all of the assholes who can't manage to control themselves and show a little common decency to their fellow human beings.
I was at a coffee shop on my way to work about a year or two back and some guy came in drunk off his ass (at about 4:30am no less, not sure if it was a late night or a real early start) and starts complaining about the service because there's a long line. He's basically screaming at the top his lungs, making everyone in the line really uncomfortable. Eventually he starts hurling insults at the servers (both sexist and racial). I try to calm the guy down, I'm being perfectly reasonable (no insults from me, no aggression), but he's drunk so he gets offended that I decided to intervene and eventually takes a swing at me. So end up in a fist fight in the middle of the coffee shop. Manager comes out saying he's called the cops and, hey, I'm never allowed back there again. The drunk was never given the same instruction to never come back. Apparently management thought I was out of line for asking him to settle down, but that the drunk was acting perfectly reasonable while he was hurling insults around the room, making everyone feel awkward as Hell, and, oh yeah, trying to punch my face in for objecting to that.
Go figure.
That's not what he was saying. He was reflecting on the idea that non-tipped jobs can also be hard, and then goes on to suggest that they make much less because of lack of tips. So either you're looking at someone who can't express their basic thoughts in a coherent manner, or someone who's ignorant of the fact that in most places tipped labor gets paid a lower minimum wage and requires tips because of that.
Make no mistake, no one anywhere in any business believes that (and for good reason). The idea is simply to humor the customer enough that it doesn't jeopardize repeat business.
bobjustbob
Proud member of FreeOnes Hall Of Fame. Retired to
The restaurant only makes money when they are serving food. When there are no customers then the waitress has nothing to do. So in your system it is the customer paying the waitresses for their down time not the owner since you charge the service fee. Is that 15% service fee your restaurants are charging going directly to the serving staff? No.
Do the math. A waitress turns 4 tables of 4 an hour at $25 per head. Is she getting that $60 the restaurant charged for service? Hell no. 2 tables of 3 at $15 per head is $13.50. Is that what waitresses get paid per hour in Euroland? Pretty good gig if that's so. Like I said earlier, why bust your ass on holidays and weekends if you can make the same money serving Tuesday lunches?
Harley Spencer
Official Checked Star Member
Maybe a little off topic, but not completely, because customers that are assholes are also the ones who don't tip. There are some who are very pleasant, nice, wonderful customers who don't tip, and I suppose they're so nice to make up for not being able to tip. But it's always a given that if a customer is an asshole, you're either going to get a shitty tip or no tip at all.
Because the customer is always right.
Everything else is allowed except that the customer hit the waiter.
No, the customer is not always right. The customer is almost always wrong. The one and only reason that general rule of thumb was ever stupidly created was because according to their theory, the nicer you are and the more bullshit you tolerate, the more customers who will keep coming back. But truthfully, the customer service industry lost billions of dollars when that rule came about, because after people discovered they could be rude and obnoxious and get away with it, they continued to do so in order to get discounts and free meals, and they keep doing it over and over again. I have personally caught people red handed lying to me about their order being wrong or unsatisfactory, multiple times.
The customer likes to believe they are always right because they're self entitled, they think they're the center of the universe and can get away with anything, and of course now that's because they can because CEOs force their employees to put up with it. In all reality, it should be the other way around. People go to a business to receive a service. The business is the one being paid, not the customer, therefore obviously the business is the one in control. Good business strategy, apparently, is to make the customer think THEY have the control.
Respect should be a two way street. No one deserves to be talked to and treated like pieces of dirt for no good reason, and that's what goes on in customer service. That's not right, I don't care who you are or what your bullshit logic is, because this isn't about logic, this is about morals, being right, doing the right thing. Too many people are whiney cry babies over the smallest things. There are more important things in the world to make a fuss over, like poverty, war, starvation, death, sickness. Clearly the people who make fusses over these things have nothing better to do.
Exactly, the only people who really believe in honoring "the customer is always right" are the people at the top of the ladder, the CEOs, who don't personally have to deal with the whining lunatics.
I'd be pissed in your coffee shop situation. I'd take the dumbasses to court. Not only are they in the wrong, but they're banning a helpful, kind, pleasant customer who could keep coming back, and they're keeping a rude, obnoxious, unpleasant customer, who will continue to act that way no matter how drunk he is, which is also subjecting the employees to verbal abuse. That's no way to treat your employees, who are doing your dirty work. That's the very reason there is such a high turnover in customer service, because very few people are willing to put up with that kind of nonsense.
Technically it's voluntary but it's seen as so integral that no one thinks of it in the way that you do. If it was TRULY socialistic, then the government would require everyone to tip a certain percentage.
Anyone who doesn't tip when it's in a customary situation in the US is scorned and ridiculed.
Also, ultimately, I can't help but feel that indulging those who misbehave is generally bad business. I can't figure out why on Earth do so many companies allow it. I mean, whenever you see a customer make a scene and act disruptively you tend not to see the other customers rallying behind those customers. No, you see everyone else get very uncomfortable. People start awkwardly shifting about, they look away, they try and fade into background more often than not. No one wants to see that. No one wants to be there. Pretty much no one likes it when this happens, not the staff and not other customers either. It becomes an awkward and embarrassing social experience. So they indulge one person and as a result literally everyone else in the room is bothered by the resulting scene, including all of the other paying customers. If they're so worried about pleasing their consumers... why don't they focus on how everyone else in the room is reacting to this instead of the one person being a jerk?
From a business perspective it doesn't seem to make any sense catering to the person who is making the rest of your customers feel lousy, possibly driving them off, and probably making them not to want to return. I don't get the logic at work here.
I wasn't too concerned about being asked not to return. The coffee was always kinda lousy (bad franchise in general), I'd just tend to hit it every now and then because they were less prone to having long lines than the local Tim Hortons. I've been more than happy to endure the lines since then.
What bothered me, really, is that the manager was in the back the whole time watching everything unfold. At least three other customers had already left because they didn't want to witness the scene. Everyone was upset. The manager (who was about twice the size of the guy causing all the problems by the way) just sat on his hands doing nothing.
Harley Spencer
Official Checked Star Member
You don't want to end up tipping in a foreign country where it's considered rude to tip. The lesson to be learned is to do your research about a place before going to visit. Google it.
bobjustbob
Proud member of FreeOnes Hall Of Fame. Retired to
The customer is always right. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't in services. The bottom rung is instructed what can and can not be given for satisfying a customer. The rules are very strict. However, the rules change for management discretion. What happens here is not a question of if the associate was right or wrong, it becomes "Do I want this going to my boss?" Somewhere up the chain it becomes "Why am I being bothered with this shit? Just give it to them." The associate always looks like the bad guy. Nature of the business.
Here's an example of the guys upstairs grasp of what goes on in the store. Bradlee's department store hired a firm to do a study about shoppers issues. They came back with their report and the brass rolled out a program designed to address customer satisfaction titled "Yes I Can." Any refund under $50 was given cash with or without receipt. If a customer at the register simply said that the price on the sign was less than the ticket, no price check if it was 20% up to $20. Over that was a higher limit that just needed a key from the cashier supervisor.
In a 4 month trial the special price keys ran up $3 million and the refund desk shot up 40% for the chain. Let's not forget the thievery going on in both places.
Here's an example of the guys upstairs grasp of what goes on in the store. Bradlee's department store hired a firm to do a study about shoppers issues. They came back with their report and the brass rolled out a program designed to address customer satisfaction titled "Yes I Can." Any refund under $50 was given cash with or without receipt. If a customer at the register simply said that the price on the sign was less than the ticket, no price check if it was 20% up to $20. Over that was a higher limit that just needed a key from the cashier supervisor.
In a 4 month trial the special price keys ran up $3 million and the refund desk shot up 40% for the chain. Let's not forget the thievery going on in both places.
That's true, but I think that the most of the waiteres take the tip.
"If the customer is not right then he or she obtains services elsewhere"
(assari)
Harley Spencer
Official Checked Star Member
Hahaha! I've totally done that once. With the woman I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the one who was harassing the new 16 year old cook, I got her banned from ever coming there again. I personally didn't have the authority to throw someone out. I mean I could, all I'd have to do is tell them to get the fuck out, but of course they'd go whining to corporate and my pussy ass boss (the owner) would probably have fired me. So I wrote this long ass note detailing the incident, passed it on to the general manager, and one day the crazy lady called and bitched to the GM for 33 minutes on the phone, which made the GM finally understand that I wasn't just whining about customers and I was legit serious, so she talked to the owner who finally banned the psychotic bitch.
I think that the woman was mentally ill.
In such cases you should stay calm and give empathy, because the other part is irresponsible
Harley Spencer
Official Checked Star Member
She wasn't the type of mentally ill you're talking about. There was no way in hell I was going to ever give her sympathy. Uh-uh, no way, not happening. That woman was such a bitch. And guess what's even better? It turned out that the 16 year old girl's mom worked at a store at the mall and that very same woman would go into her store on a regular basis 5 minutes to close to go shopping, and when she would check out, she would make a scene. And when we reported her to the cops (stuff like this apparently has to go through legal systems), the cops said that the lady made it a habit for causing problems like that at different stores. So we weren't the only ones and it wasn't all in my head, which I LOVED, because my boss always made it a point at my reviews to tell me that the one thing I needed to work on was calming down and not getting so upset and offended by customers. She thought all the times I got pissed about customers was in my head, that I was over exaggerating. Wrong. Proof from the cops themselves.
xfire
New Twitter/X @cxffreeman
If the owner doesn't give the managers full power to run the restaurant then fuck them. One of the funniest things I saw was a drunk customer told that if they got thrown the fuck out they would stay thrown the fuck out. People will push the limits as far as you let them, and if you're regularly abused as a server it's because of bad management.
Harley Spencer
Official Checked Star Member
Well it was a Pizza Hut, so it's this big chain restaurant with a big corporate office in Texas, and I was working at a Franchise one. At restaurants like that, you can't do that kind of stuff, otherwise corporate will be on your ass. Corporate babies their customers to no end. For example. The woman I mentioned who was bitching about extra cheese being 50 cents more, I ended up comping her entire meal for her. She bitched and bitched at me, all while hitting the menu while I was holding it in front of her to point out where it said extra cheese costs extra (she was claiming that nowhere on the menu did it say that extra cheese is an extra charge)- she was really hitting that menu which pissed me off so fucking much- so I finally said, "You know what? Forget it. Don't worry about it. Your entire meal is free." And walked away without letting her respond. Just to be done with her. I can only stand there and take that abuse for so long before smoke is about to blow out my ears, so I ended it right there. And what's she do? Bitches some more. Then she writes a letter to corporate, who sends the letter to the owner. And guess what the owner wanted to do? Give her more free shit! You know what she complaining about in her letter? That she got free shit. Noooo, she didn't want to get a free meal, she just wanted to pay for the extra cheese (really bitch? really? then why the fuck were you complaining to me that extra cheese is an extra charge?!). Customers twist stories around to the upper management and the upper management refuses to listen to their employees, babying the abusive customers. It's really messed up.
I am sooooo unbelievably happy to not be working in the restaurant business anymore! Ugh. It's amazing not having a real job.
