Where I live there are a few outlets of big chain restuarants that give pretty bad service… yet I keep going there simply because I want that particular food and they’re the only place to get it. I used to think that bad service = bad business = out of business pretty fast; that’s what everyone always says at least. Now I’m leaning towards that idea being more of a “sour grapes” idea - something not really true that I think to myself to feel better.
I can see it being true for a small Mom&Pop operation when first starting, but once a business gets established for a few years, will degrading to poor service really have that much of an impact? Has anyone ever heard of a company that went out of business for treating clients poorly?
For most of the things I spend money on, I don’t really have the luxury of choice. If I want some PVC fittings this afternoon, there’s exactly one place in town that will have them - and they’re real pricks. That doesn’t stop me from doing business with them, and since those parts aren’t luxery items for me, I wouldn’t give them any more business of they were nice. When does bad service actually harm what kind of business seriously enough to force them to change or go bankrupt?
But if you could get that particular food AND good service from the competition, you would, right?
If there’s no one else providing that service, I guess it doesn’t matter. But sooner or later, someone’ll come along and challenge them for their customers.
I can think of **many **times in which I’ve taken my business elsewhere, because of bad service (unless it’s a monopoly like the post office), and I know other people who’ve done the same. I don’t know what kind of “measurable” effect you’re looking for, but I assume there have been surveys done on the subject.
How about all the politicians who are voted out of office?
On a national scale, how about K-Mart? They had many problems which led up to their bankruptcy. However, they were known for poor service and dirty stores.
They couldn’t compete with the higher priced Target which had nice stores and better service. Wal-mart has poor service as well, but lower prices. People who were willing to put up with the poor service went to Wal-mart. Target took the discount service who was fed up with K-mart, but didn’t want to deal with the hassles of Wal Mart.
Venture, which was another Midwestern chain that wanted to be like Target, was basically done in by out-of-stock inventory and poor customer service. Although business analysts would claim they were just outmuscled by Target, Wal-Mart and even K-Mart.
Of course, the ultimate in poor customer service would be to have your customers die. I think airplane crashes doomed Air Florida and ValuJet (although that airline reorganized as Jet Blue.)
I just ran into this situation this past weekend. I had gone to a bar that used to be one of my favorites, but had really gotten on my nerves for their outrageous prices and lack of customer service (mostly to see a friend that works there). The frustration had been building, but that night it just ended up exploding, and I went off on the head manager, and he asked my brother and myself never to return…not that I was planning on it anyway.
Now, beer-wise, the bar is called by some “The Best Belgian Beer Bar in America” (mostly by themselves, but I digress…), but their total lack of interest in their customers and outrageous drink prices drove me away as well as many other lovers of craft beer in the Pittsburgh area; to places that may not necessarily have quite as many taps, but that don’t charge $6/pint and treat their “customers” as nothing but walking wallets ready to be tapped.
I would and have avoided a restaurant for what I considered bad service. I don’t care what the food is like. It doesn’t taste very good when I’m ticked off. Maybe it helps that I’m a decent cook and probably can recreate most anything a large chain restaurant can do, usually with better results. Out of morbid curiosity, what food items do you feel you can only get in a certain place?
Beergeek, there’s a nice Belgian-style brewery down here. If you ever get down you should check it out.
Well, I assure you we will not be going back to the Applebee’s where they threatened to throw my mom out for being upset that the food was an hour late with no apologies in sight and my diabetic father needing to eat. I also assure you that if our friends are still going there, they definately aren’t brave enough to tell us.
I don’t know if bad service, in this day and age, will necessarily drive any place under, but I do know that good service will do the opposite. We have a fantastic plumber who’s on time, very competent, and quite reasonable. He also looks and smells like somebody you’d never allow in your home, but he’s got more business than he can handle. (And also some fantastically enormous number of ex-wives, it seems.)
I drive all the way to town rather than shopping at the grocery store close to my home. To be fair, they not only have bad service, but also unimpressive prices and scary clientele. But I wouldn’t go there even if I had the place to myself and the milk was on sale.
We used to have a non-chain used video game store in a good location with good prices and good selection.
However, every female customer and kid under 12 that went in (that I witnessed, anyway) was treated like they didn’t know what they were doing, were only there to steal or take up their precious time.
I asked a question in there once about a particular game, and the guy looked right at me, smiled, and went into the back. I never went back. They went out of business shortly afterwards.
If you don’t have a competitive market, bad service probably won’t make so much of a dent in business, especially if the food’s good. But if there’s a competitor that can give good service and good food, it will.
My husband and I have stopped going to several restaurants where we love the food, but the service is so awful we won’t come back, even for takeout. One of those restaurants made a really, really wonderful dish that we weren’t able to find anywhere else in town. But we hated the service so much that I simply figured out how to make it myself and prepared it at home. Fortunately, another restaurant has opened that makes the same thing now, so I don’t have to cook it if I don’t feel like it. But, yeah, if the service is bad enough, it should negatively affect a restaurant’s business.
As to the OP, bad service will definitely lead me to never go back someplace. I guess my hope is that enough people will do something similar, and the power of numbers will have a real effect on the business.
Restaurants are a tricky business. I’ve worked at a large chain restraunt, and we provided great service most of the time. The waiters worked extra hard to develop relationships with their regulars, provide extra special touches for diners with kids (like bringing out some crackers while they wait for their meal) and give great service all around. But we had to expect that a certain percentage of our diners were going to go home upset. Because of the increadably fast pace of restraurant work, a certain percentage of things are going to be botched and the customer may not understand why we do some things in a certain order (like the hostess will cash out an order before they will bus a dirty table and sit someone there because if they don’t cash out the order the customer will walk out without paying and hopefully the busser will appear and bus the table and hopefully a table will open up in a section that isn’t slammed…but all the people waiting see is that there are empty tables and they are not being seated in them). This is especially true on a busy Sunday morning when diners are already grumpy because of the inevitable half-hour wait for a table.
I also worked for a large, evil video rental chain. The staff got their kicks by providing the most insanely good service possible, despite corporate mandates to screw over everyone and everything. I remember doing stuff like giving guided tours of the foreign section (my specialty), taking pictures of customers on my cellphone and emailing them to customers wanting to remember a special moment, and calling my personal friends (also movie buffs) to track down the unremembered titles of movies. Everyone on the staff went above and beyond every day, and we had quite a collection of regulars (one would bake us cookies) and even groupies that would hang around the store just to be with us. And yet every day we’d have someone ranting and raving about how we gave the worst service ever and they’d never shop here again etc. etc.
I guess what I’m saying is that in what one person perceives as “bad service” may just be a matter of perception or an accident of circumstances. Every shift I’d have people talking about how great the service was and how awful it was. We factor a certain amount of dissatification in. If a place has good service or not is not often a matter of concensus and only affects revenues in extreme circumstances.
I love Indian food. There’s only one Indian restaurant in Asheville, and the one time I went there, the server ignored us for over half an hour while she sat at the only other occupied table in the restaurant chatting with her friends. I kept trying to make eye contact, trying to get her to come over so we could at least get our check and leave, but she just flat-out ignored us.
It’s been over a year since I’ve eaten Indian food. I don’t require sterling service, but I get really stressed when the servers completely ignore me, trapping me at the restaurant for too long, and I’ll refuse to go back to such a restaurant until I hear that they’ve hired new servers.
