We’ve all asked for some extras at the restaurants, right?\u00a0 We want malt vinegar instead of white for our fries\/chips, we want extra ketchup packets from the fast-food place so we can put them in our fridge, we want 2 helpings of the special dipping sauce at Swiss Chalet<\/b><\/i>.\u00a0 The question the wait staff, managers and owners of restaurants need to ask themselves is – how much is too much?\u00a0 That’s tricky when you live in a culture of “the customer is always right”.<\/i><\/p>\n
I remember I used to visit a Red Lobster<\/b><\/i> in St. Catharines (this is going back a long time ago…mid-nineties!)<\/i> and they were always giving away free appetizers or discounts off the bill if anything was a few minutes late or if the customer ever said “boo”.<\/i>\u00a0 I remember thinking at the time, as I ate my comp shrimp cocktail, that the place must be losing a ton of money.<\/p>\n
Anyway back to more recent times, a couple of years ago I took my girlfriend (now my wife<\/i>) to a new restaurant for Valentine’s Day<\/b>.\u00a0 We went to Mambo’s<\/b><\/i> on the Danforth.\u00a0 Let me tell you – it was awesome!\u00a0 Great service, great tapas, great mojitos…couldn’t ask for anything more.\u00a0 I immediately signed up for their newsletter to get coupons emailed to me regularly.\u00a0 We went a couple more times and even when they changed some items on the menu and did some reno (I can’t remember if they changed management hands or not<\/i>) we still came back for special occasions, or when we were feeling like we needed to be spoiled.<\/p>\n
Anywho, here is my story that relates to the title:\u00a0 I got an email offer that said if it was your birthday you could come in and get a free main\/dinner.\u00a0 I thought that was good, but who eats by themselves on their birthday at a restaurant like that, right?\u00a0 So I emailed back to the owner asking, since my girlfriend and I had birthdays within 8 days of each other, could we come in and both get a free main in one night?<\/p>\n
I know, I know – I was being a bit pushy right?\u00a0 But you know what they say – you never know until you ask.\u00a0 I thought I wasn’t asking for that much, since we were returning customers and he would know that from our names since we had signed up for special nights before via internet.<\/p>\n
What happened?\u00a0 He never emailed me back.<\/span>\u00a0 Ever!\u00a0 I guess he felt it was too much to ask, and instead of responding or negotiating with me, he wrote nothing.\u00a0 I felt a bit embarrassed and so we never returned to the restaurant again.\u00a0 Ever.<\/p>\n So the question is now upon you; if you were the customer,\u00a0 waitstaff,\u00a0 manager or the restaurant owner, what would you do?\u00a0\u00a0 How would you respond to my email\/request?\u00a0 All straight-forward and also creative answers welcome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’ve all asked for some extras at the restaurants, right?\u00a0 We want malt vinegar instead of white for our fries\/chips, we want extra ketchup packets from the fast-food place so we can put them in our fridge, we want 2 helpings of the special dipping sauce at Swiss Chalet.\u00a0 The question the wait staff, managers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[536],"tags":[651,569],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service","tag-restaurants","tag-toronto"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":728,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.communicationcoach.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}