Two quick stories:
1. Yesterday I took Agnes to one of our local diners. I wanted to share with her a recent delicious discovery made with the benevolent assistance of a co-worker’s recommendation. It’s a daily special of grilled pita beneath Greek salad studded with your choice of grilled shrimp, chicken or marinated skirt steak. Its magnificence lay both in its simplicity and in combining the shrimp with a side of the grilled skirt steak for a miniature Mediterranean lunch appropriate version of surf and turf.
However, as I reviewed the menu it was pretty clear that the special was only available as part of the weekly menu. I was disappointed, but figured I would see if they could accommodate a special request. Unfortunately, the waitress advised that the pita salad was only available during the week and the closest option they could offer during the weekend was their filet mignon with a small Greek side salad.
By the time I figured in a side of grilled shrimp I was looking at an $80 bill for the two of us and while tangentially similar, any BV knows that the mildly flavored, tender filet was not a real match for the gamier, toothsome skirt steak and would in truth bear little actual resemblance to the special in question. Needless to say, our attention turned to other more “lunch priced” options.
2. One of my associates in all things BV is on a business trip in Dallas . He is having lunch and killing time at a nice restaurant waiting for his next flight and he texts me: “This place has a ham tasting. Five hams from across country. I’ll be getting that shortly!” I am excited by a flight tasting of five hams from across the country, but my friend is GF (medically related, not a fad diet, so shut the fuck up) so the prospect of finding something intriguing on a menu not involving the GF trinity of beef, bacon or lamb no doubt possesses a specific brand of excitement. Later in the day I asked after the ham tasting, “NG,” comes the response, “Menu changed mid-day for dinner. Missed it by 45 minutes. I asked, bartender said no dice.” I was probably more disappointed than he was.
Onward to the meat of the matter so that you can get back to binge watching whatever great television serial is currently holding sway in your life.
The ham incident sparked a conversation between my friend and I about “yes." In our business, we say yes all the time. We say “yes,” when it is easier and likely beneficial for the businesses we represent to say “no.” We say “yes” to things after mumbling to ourselves, “I cannot believe that this asshole is asking me for this.” To borrow, the old U.S. Army tag, we say “yes” more times before 10AM, than that waitress or bartender says all day. And frankly neither of us is directly involved with the service industry like these two professionals whose business should involve “yes” every five minutes or so.
These two servers had the ability to take it upon themselves and say “yes” OR requested a minute, taken a brief stroll and asked the chef/head cook/owner for an accommodation because we all know the truth:
In my case, it’s a diner. They had all of the requisite ingredients available to make the pita salad special in question and I was in no way expecting them to do so at the discounted price. I would have paid full boat, plus a nuisance fee and the standard asshole tax for that matter. It was an attainable “ask.”
In the instance of my friend, the restaurant did not run out of the five different hams from across the country or the bartender would have said, “I’m sorry we just sold out of that.” They may have been moved from a prep area to cold storage, but the hams were available for sale. So again a totally attainable “ask.”
I want to be clear. These two service professionals did nothing wrong and this is not meant as an indictment. In fact, they may very well have been adhering to company policy in the process of saying “no,” but consider that in this Internet day and age your “no” can be and often is broadcast in the space and two minutes it takes to bang out a scathing, poorly written diatribe on one of the innumerable trashy Internet food gossip sites (I refuse to say or use the words “food review website”) on a cellular telephonic device.
For the business owner, would it not be better if that almost instantaneous feedback were positive? Beyond that you and your business stood to benefit from the word of mouth that would have been generated by saying“yes.”
“Hey man, if you’re ever in Dallas or on the East End of Long Island, be sure to check out this joint. They’ll take care of you. Check out the ham tasting or the miniature Mediterranean lunch appropriate version of surf and turf. It’s the best.”
And from a purely selfish standpoint, those service professionals would have seen a good tip (BV’s never punish staff, even for “bad” service) transition into a story about the time they received an awesome EFing tip because I said “yes” to a pain in the ass who wanted the ham tasting after lunch hours were over.