Thursday 22 August 2013

The baconless BLT

When you order a BLT with no bacon, what do you get? The answer, in our restaurant at least, is lettuce and tomato on a toasted turkish roll with aioli, served with chips and salad. Apparently, according to a recent customer, there is some other mythical place where a BLT with no Bacon gets served with a burger paddy instead of the greasy pig meat.

Now, maybe I'm being unreasonable here, and this customer would certainly agree with that sentiment, but if I go a restaurant, read the menu and order something off the menu, minus an ingredient, I don't automatically assume that the chef will then automatically substitute, with no prompting from me, the removed item with something else entirely different.

But this lady kicked up a right royal stinky poo when we took her baconless BLT to her and she realised that all of us had failed to read her mind and replace the bacon with the wagyu beef patty from the wagyu beef burger that was on the menu.

Now here's the thing. The wagyu beef burger is similar to the BLT in that it is served on turkish roll, with lettuce and tomato. It has no aioli but does have caramelised onion and tomato relish, and also comes with chips and salad. Due to the fact that wagyu beef is more expensive for us to buy, the wagyu burger is a few dollars more than the BLT. Makes sense right?

So if this princess had asked us to substitute the wagyu beef for the bacon, we would have charged her for the burger and not the BLT. But she didn't ask, which makes it totally weird that she thought we would automatically make the assumption that that is what she wanted.

Anyway, she asked us to make a beef paddy to go on the baconless BLT, which we said we would do but it would take about 10 minutes and we'd have to charge her a bit more. She agreed (begrudgingly) but then about 4 minutes later, got up huffing and puffing, stormed over to tell us not to worry about it, she couldn't possibly wait any longer, and off she went. She galavanted off home and promptly jumped on to her computer to leave a scathing review about the terrible service and bad attitude of the staff.

Whatever, I mean, as the manager, I should maybe care a little about the fact that she was so unhappy and that we got a bad review as a result. But to be quite honest, I'm just totally confused about the whole thing. I still can't get my head around what she was thinking when she ordered, the way she reacted when she got exactly what she ordered and how she left with the impression she'd been treated badly.

Whoever said "the customer is always right" was clearly a raving idiot. The customer is so very rarely right that a more accurate phrase would be "the customer is often a self absorbed douche bag with an ego problem that will force them to treat you like crap and blame you for their mistakes but your job is to make them happy so despite this fact, you will pander to their ridiculous ego and let them think they are right and maybe you will be rewarded with a tip and maybe not, but at least you will be the bigger person!"

Or something like that.

Baconless BLT lady, you confused the hell out of me!