Inspired by a thread in Mundane about an expensive bottle of wine.
Restaurants are in the hospitality business. Keeping customers happy can often mean repeat business.
Somebody complains about a cold steak it gets replaced. Even if half the steak had been eaten. Somebody trips on the carpet and you apologize, and there’s no charge for the meal. Etc. Service with a smile.
If that same customer returns and repeatedly encounters problems in your business, then maybe it’s not worth having them as a customer. At some point you can’t help but suspect their motives. Especially the dine and dash customers that *simply forgot *to pay their ticket.
Do the local restaurant managers warn each other? Watch out for… he likes heavily discounted meals?
Is their a list of names that gets circulated? Like the old hot check lists that used to be taped up beside the cash register?
I tended bar for years and all the local bartenders and managers knew each other and talked quite frequently. It was not uncommon for another manager to walk in, have a beer and say something like “Just so you know, if Joe Blow starts hanging around here instead of my place like usual it’s probably because his tab is over $100 and I cut him off until he pays me. You might not want to give him credit until he gets his shit together.”
I was trying to think of scams that a customer might pull for a discount or free meal. Hairs in the food, insects in the food, tripping and falling, etc. I’d guess there are dozens more that I’m not aware of.
Family run, small restaurants are different from chains and fast food. Trip at McDonalds and they’d probably laugh at you. A small family run place puts more emphasis on service and repeat business.
Yes, restaurant owners talk to each other and may point out a problem customer. But mostly they’re highly competitive and they might want the other owners to get taken in.
I’m picturing that you trip over a restuarants jenky-ass carpet and bump into a waiter who has a tray full of foods and glasses of wine. So wine and food go all over you, the waiter and three people at the table right next to you.
As you fall you instinctly grab the hair of the woman at the table next to you which causes you to bump your head on the back of a chair and pulls the woman over and you both bump your heads on the ground and get knocked unconscious.
After you both wake up in the hospital you start talking about threatening to sue the restuarant. But the manager is a nice guy and visits you in the hospital and he brings flowers. He says he feels super bad about the whole thing and they are not going to charge you for the meals you never got to finish
The good news is when you both got x-rayed the doctors found the brain cancer and successfully removed it.
This is not my experience at all.
I’ve worked for many years in several bars and restaurants and I’ve never seen anyone wish bad things for another place, in fact we try to help each other out.
I’ve seen that too just as a customer. It’s not unusual for the bars in my town to borrow a bottle from one another if they run out of a certain kind of booze or something.
I worked in a bar in college. There were two other bars in immediate walking distance. I’d call them if we had an obvious scammer, such as people coming in, ordering a couple shots, then only having one credit card which was declined. I’d also call occasionally if I ran across a particularly good fake ID.
