I agree! I’m someone with high standards of competency for basic things. If you can’t get basic stuff right, why should I trust you on complicated stuff?
This is my exact opinion and reasoning.
OK, I will be the one fellow… It depends on who I am recomending restaurants to. I consider my audiance as well as the restaurant when I make recomendations. Since I do this, I can not vote in the poll.
An a fore mentioned FIL that goes ballistic for minor flubs, he gets restaurant #1. To my good friend, Richard, who likes folks and does not mind minor errors, restaurants #1, & #2. While I would not mention #2 to the picky FIL.
On another note, I will try to avoid the picky FIL at almost all costs. Life is too short for me to associate with people like this. I do not enjoy this kind of drama. I will leave his “pickyness” (intolerance) for others, who do enjoy the drama, to deal with. He is not perfect and should not make a huge scene when some one else make a minor mistake. Heck, sometime, somewhere, I will be the one who makes the mistake. I chose not to deal with angry people, relatives or not.
Deliberate?
Agree with the prevailing opinion - I voted for all options except the third, because I would be equally happy to recommend either place, but it’s not true to say the mistake would not enter my mind - because how it was handled is a big part of being able to recommend place number two.
E, it wouldn’t matter to me, I’d recommend either.
Forgetting the mistake part, I’m certain the two places are not truly identical. Being a bit of a foodie, I’d recommend the one with the perfect ceviche appetizer, or the bisque we talked about in bed that night.
It is the same restaurant. In one universe everything was perfect. In the alternate universe there was that one mistake during the meal. And the Giants won on Sunday night. Everything else in the universe is the same.
WHOA! You made no mention that the restaurant was in the Bizarro Universe before!
This. If I had to choose one over the other, this is why I would choose the restaurant that corrected their mistake. Mistakes happen, and while what was described was definitely above and beyond the call of duty, it’s nice to know that an establishment is very interested in customer experience and repeat business.
Honestly though, they would be near equal in my mind. It’s possible that the “flawless” restaurant would handle a mistake very poorly, but I’m certainly not going to penalize them over a hypothetical.
Sorry. Fighting the hypothetical always gets me in trouble.
Which place has the waitress with big knobs?
Ah, a misogynistic boob joke. Always hilarious. :rolleyes:
NM
A few years ago, my wife and I enjoyed a very nice meal at an upper-mid-scale restaurant here in Denver. I noticed that one of my drink glasses had a small chip on the rim, but didn’t say anything until we got the check and I mentioned it to the waiter just so they could take it out of service.
Before we got the receipt, the manager came to our table, apologized and gave us a gift certificate for a free dessert the next time we came in. I hadn’t complained or anything, and I sure wasn’t expecting any sort of compensation, but I have a much stronger and more favorable memory of that experience than I have of pretty much any dining experience in which nothing went amiss.
(I chose the second option in the poll. I recognize that mistakes will happen – mostly because I make them all the time – and how they’re handled is very important to me.)
This is what I was going to say as well. Assuming it’s not a pattern of behavior, I’m not going to ding a restaurant because of an honest mistake. Nobody’s perfect, you know, and the restaurant went out of their way to make things right.
I’d regard them equally. Mistakes happen, no business is perfect. That I was in a restaurant that had great food and the service was flawless, I’m in the majority. If I’m in a restaurant and it’s a minor mistake, like the ones mentioned, and it was handled appropriately, which as described it was, then I see no reason to believe it isn’t a rarity. After all, a restaurant that makes mistakes and then fixes them with discounts constantly won’t stay in business.
So, I see no reason to look worse on a restaurant the makes a mistake and corrects it to my satisfaction. At the same time, I see no reason to reward them over an equivalent restaurant that didn’t even get afforded the opportunity to fix a mistake because they were flawless. Yeah, maybe that restaurant may have done a crap job making up for it, or maybe they would have done an even better job. After all, because mistakes WILL happen, I consider making up for a mistake to be good service. It’s when a mistake happens and I have to convince them that they messed up or they don’t automatically either comp the mistaken item or provide a discount that it’s in the realm of poor service.
So, yeah, I voted C.
We’re all human, we all make mistakes, and if the restaurant in question handles their occasional mistakes well, it’s all good.
That said, if the restaurant keeps making mistakes, I’m not going back, nor am I recommending it to someone else. I don’t care how well the restaurant handles their mistakes, the fact that it’s consistent shows a real problem. The converse is true if the restaurant usually has flawless service but won’t acknowledge when it has made a mistake.
Huh, 38 posts and I get to be the first?
Restaurants make mistakes primarily when they have bad management systems in place, because a good system would ensure that information is collected and passed along to the necessary employees, and that quality assurance is carried out at each key step.
So any mistake that’s visible to the customer is actually two mistakes - an initial failure and then a failure to stop the problem.
That they made up for is nice enough. I might give them a second chance, but I will also wonder if they don’t think a few discounts are just a cost of doing business because they don’t understand restaurant management. What other mistakes is lousy management causing? Are they cleaning regularly? Did they check the temperatures on their food? And so on… there are a million problems I can’t see, but the fact that there was one mistake I did see makes everything suspect.