Nasty
Habits
Very occasionally at The Victorian Teashop we get awkward
customers– or stupid people as we like to call them.
They range from groups of four who order a pot of tea for
one and hog a table during a very busy period, to oddities
such as the customer who ordered a baked potato with both
spicy beans in a chilli sauce and also ordinary baked beans
in tomato sauce too? Same potato! We even had a customer who
thought it was legitimate to ask for the entire choice of
baked potato fillings in one potato! That would have consisted
of cheese, baked beans, chilli beans, coleslaw, tuna, tuna
and mayo and ham – yummy! “Do you want salad with
that, Sir? We know you do!”
There is, of course, the old adage “The customer is
always right”, and this is as true today as it has always
been – it’s not true at all. The best we can say
is that: most customers are right most of the time and the
rest are very possibly stupid, or have some debilitating disorder,
such as Alzheimer’s. “Excuse me, Miss, I ordered
a cheese salad sandwich just a few moments ago, why have I
got cheese and onion”, “I’ll just check”,
is the usual response, where a better one might be: “Go
for a brain scan, like your doctor advised you to”.
I sometimes think that ‘uptheirownarse.com’ customers
use the term ‘Miss’ when referring to our staff
as a shortened version of ‘mistake’. More often
the truth is that the occasional awkward customer has brought
their foul mood in with them and are reluctant to let it go
– it is very possibly all they have to cling on to,
so they nurture it like a baby; showing it to everyone whether
they want to see it or not, and just like when being shown
a big fat mithering baby with a red face, everyone smiles
and puts up with it and hopes it drops off to sleep, or better
still, is removed to another part of the world.
We don’t get very many awkward customers, but sometimes
they just seem on a mission to screw up your day as much as
they intend to screw up their own. Recently, a women came
in (followed by a ‘trailer’ husband). She wanted
to know if we did a decaffeinated 'bean to cup' coffee
in the form of a cappuccino and seemed ready to leave immediately
when she got the expected negative response. We do fresh ‘bean
to cup’ coffee, but it would be impractical to offer
decaffeinated ‘bean to cup’ since we only get
a request for it once a year, if that, and that would be some
waste of an expensive bean to cup machine! She was politely
offered several types of decaffeinated coffee, including a
decaf cappuccino, but, as she said “it’s just
not quite the same, is it”. No, I thought, because you
can get this here and now – you can’t get the
other stuff here and now – that fact alone makes it
not quite the same. Besides, decaf has less flavour and can
be subjected to chemicals (see the note below*).
The
truth is, she seemed very hyper to me – as though she’d
been chain-drinking ordinary coffee with full caffeine for
a few days, non-stop, and probably needed decaf very urgently.
The husband seemed pale and worn out – fed up –
bemused – in need of caffeine. They left as though it
was our fault that they had become middle-aged twats. “How
about a tea or a hot chocolate and some lovely relaxing ‘decaffeinated
décor’ in our very splendid Victorian
Teashop? We won't wake you up, honest!”
...but they were gone. Some people are beyond beauty and reason.
One of the most annoying types of customer are those who are
obviously on a research mission. They probably have a café
of their own and are out to see what other people are doing
so they can copy the good bits (without admitting it) and
criticise the rest in order to bolster their own flagging
confidence and general lack of aptitude. They even steal the
menu sometimes, but what for? What they fail to see is that
what we serve is only a small part of what we do and the price
we serve it at is largely irrelevant – even on the same
street it doesn't matter much. What needs to be added into
the equation is the fact that we do actually provide a very
good customer service, as good as any I have witnessed and
better than most. I think that comes from the fact that I
am very impatient with café service and always have
been – sometimes it is nothing short of appalling and
I can’t image how they get away with it. We all make
mistakes occasionally, but some places just don’t seem
to have the basic skills. Another factor to add into the overall
equation is the décor we have provided and the atmosphere
we create – which is generally excellent and only spoiled
by our irritation with spies, idiots and ‘toileteers’
(more about 'toileteers' in the next blog).
Running a café is pretty much about the area you are
in, the customer base and whether you can be bothered or not.
Many café owners can’t be bothered, but to be
fair to them, that effect can be easily generated by those
‘difficult’ customers to a point where café
owners can get a totally jaundiced impression of everyone
– then all customers can seem ‘difficult’
– which spoils it totally. At this point they may as
well give the café business up, but they don’t
because they have nothing else to do. They carry on with the
nasty habit of creating disgruntlement amongst what would
have been a very normal and useful customer base, had they
not fucked it up with their jaded approach – nothing
is safe in those wretched, fumbling hands – gone forever
are those genuine, trusting people who were willing to believe
in the dream we created for them – now forevermore mistrusting
the service we all offer – thanks to a few disillusioned
incompetents.
....disillusion itself is a nasty habit. They pass it on like
a virus. You see these customers striding along the street
– vetoing every cafe along the way, afraid to enter
in case they are confronted again with Basil Fawlty, or worse,
some pointless character whose cynicism comes first beyond
any other consideration. And where "have a nice day"
is at its most insincere, and least likely to happen.
Some make the mistake of thinking that running a café
is all about food and drink, when in actual fact it’s
about much more; some people just don’t have the capacity
to think beyond the basics and that is one of the reasons
why English cafes have got a reputation for being little more
than ‘greasy spoons’ – the obsession with
'chips' and 'all day breakfasts'
doesn’t help either – where the fuck did that
come from? All Day Breakfast? Probably some marketing concept
developed by middle of the road establishments who couldn't
do 'fish and chips' with conviction and needed something similarly
brainless.
Fish and chips can be served without much thought on either
side of the counter between 11.00am and 11.00pm and the 'All
Day Breakfast' can be just as non-taxing between 6.00am and
6.00pm – in other words, twelve hours of sleep before
bedtime. The brief for that concept was simple – to
use the modern parlance, quite literally a no-brainer: 'How
do you offer a nation who can't and won't be bothered to think
about food, something to eat without really trying'.
They say' fish and chips' is 'brain food', so I find it ironic
that it is the one meal you can travel for, buy and consume
all without using a brain at all – it's a habit, I suppose,
though not quite a nasty one, unless you're Jamie Oliver.
They
used to put 'fish and chips' in newspaper in the 'old
days' so you could read something to take your mind off
the vacuous meal you'd just bought and the scruffy old
street they'd conned you into eating it on – which
saved on decor and toilet facilities. You could always
piss in the street on your way home. Now they serve it
in grease-proof (or thought-proof paper) or little boxes,
which just don't seem right for the food and have the
added disadvantage of making even the average dick head
think 'why did I buy these?' Modern purveyors can ruin
anything, especially when they re-invent it using 'Americana'
as a good idea.
Personally speaking, running a café is not my natural
profession but since my profession is all out presentation,
quality, customer service and awareness, I have learned to
be good at it and I hope I have provided one of the best teashops
in this area. In fact, if it were not for the totally useless
part-time nature of Matlock Bath, we would put even more into
it than we already have. Having said that, we don’t
get many awkward customers, we entertain a lot of people,
we have built a good reputation and we get time off, so it’s
better that being poked with a sharp stick as my Mother used
to say – before she died from being poked with a sharp
stick – she had a nasty habit of being right!
*A
note on decaffeinated coffee
Caffeine is a substance that keeps us awake. Decaffeinated
coffee has had most of the caffeine removed. The amount of
caffeine found naturally in coffee is only about 1 or 2 percent.
So when you read "97% Caffeine Free", 97% of that
1 or 2 percent has been removed, the other 99% coffee is the
same as it was – or is it?
Most decaf coffees are made using a chemical process. This
process "washing" the beans in methylene chloride
to absorb the caffeine from the beans, which are then rinsed.
So even without caffeine, some people can’t sleep knowing
the coffee they drink is chemically processed and may still
harbour remnants.
A second method uses hot water and steam to remove the caffeine
from the coffee. However, some of the flavour is also removed,
so on both counts our awkward customer is right – it’s
just not the same, is it! Peter
Hague, 23rd January, 2007
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