Ouch!
Any time a favorite business gets blasted in the press or blogsphere, I cringe. If the complaint sounds legit, I’m torn between my loyalty to the establishment and my natural sympathy with consumers wronged. It happened today with my favorite restaurant, COCO500.
It started with a largely unseen post from January on eGullet that named names regarding an issue with a gift certificate.
The topic lay dormant until Michael Bauer wrote about it in his blog yesterday. While Bauer pulls no punches in his reviews, he is generally more discreet in his blog. Presumably this is because he has not verified the information (often from people who e-mail him) as thoroughly as he does in a review. This opens him to some criticism but I think he's making the right call. Per usual, MB wrote about the gift certificate issue but did not mention any particulars regarding the establishment or people involved.
Enter SF Eater. SF Eater generally annoys the snot out of me but they did a good job connecting the dots on this one.
Finally, a commenter on Bauer’s blog who identified himself as the giver of the gift certificate (which would also make him the eGullet poster) stated that the restaurant in question was, as suspected by SF Eater, COCO500.
The linked posts cover the story in gory detail so I’ll not repeat it. The affair reminds me of something one of my business school professors, a specialist in marketing implementation, said – that as damaging as it is to have a good strategy but execute it badly, it’s worse to faithfully execute a bad strategy. He likened it to pointing an airplane straight down and running it at full throttle.
The events are an object lesson on why it's important to consider the customers’ point of view when formulating policies, something a surprising number of businesses (not just restaurants) fail to do. As a marketing guy, I can’t tell you how many tiffs I’ve gotten into with finance, accounting and operations types who made decisions that were perfectly logical from their standpoints but that infuriated customers. Not that the customer is always right but if you expect the customer to pay for shortcomings of your internal systems and processes, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
In the abstract, I ran into a similar situation a number of years ago. I was sitting at a bar in Palo Alto. Another patron was a waiter at a very nice restaurant on the Peninsula. As he was wont to do, he was complaining about his tips or lack thereof. Somehow, we got on the subject of whether or not you should tip the same percentage on an expensive bottle of wine as you do for a cheaper one. My position was that, because no more service was rendered with an expensive bottle, it was unnecessary to tip as high a percentage as for a less expensive bottle. He countered that he had to tip out the bar 10% of the bottle’s price, irrespective of what he received. If the customer tipped a lower percentage, he got screwed.
The gentleman was complaining about the wrong thing. If the problem is your accounting, be it gift certificates or tip out policy, don’t inconvenience the customer, fix the accounting. The customer didn’t cause the problem.
While I don’t agree with COCO500s GM Clay Reynolds’ reported actions in this instance, they should be viewed as an anomaly in someone who has been unfailingly friendly and courteous in my (many) encounters with him. I suspect that he was having a bad day. He is, after all, human.
I, for one, would never have this issue. If I walk in to a restaurant with a $150 gift certificate, I'm not leaving until I’ve consumed $150 worth of food and beverage (with an assist from Mackie, of course). After all, I’m not just grumpy, I’m a glutton.
What bothered me about the name of the restaurant being released is that the only side of the story being told is the offended party's. That seems unfair.
That said, I don't think the gift certificate fiasco is that rare, since the same thing happened to my partner and me at a non-Coco500 establishment. (Part of the problem was the generosity of the gift certificate - I defy anyone to have eaten/drunk their way through it in one sitting. Oh, and for the record the gift certificate was purchased for face value, it wasn't a auction item or anything.) We didn't argue about it or raise any kind of fuss; we just haven't gone back to that restaurant.
I think your point is a good one - the restaurant got the better of that exchange, but we go out to eat fairly often and that restaurant is off our list for good. I think they could have made better money off us in the long-term.
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