Krogers
On the way back from my miserable lunch at Donatos (see below), I made my normal Friday stop at the brand new Krogers over by my office. Krogers has learned a few lessons from Giant Eagle, and the chnage they made that most pleases me is the addition of an Olive bar. I usually grab a pound or so of fresh green and Calmata olives. The greens have Feta cheese in them - yumm! Other than the fact that they don't seem to understand that pitted olives DON'T have pits on them, it's a nice set-up.
They went above and beyond, though. Krogers realized that deli areas that serve sandwiches, sushi, hot foods, and olives may be the only desitination within the store for many shoppers. Realizing that lunch shoppers probably don't have the time or inclination to stand in line behind an octogenarian buying a weeks worth of groceries, they set up a cash register over in the deli area. Sonya is the normal cashier there, and we have a nice little bantering relationship going. Today she asked me if I wanted to use my Kroger loyalty card. I told her no, it didn't get me any discounts last week when I used it. She countered with the argument that I still got points towards discounted Krogers gas by using it. I said, "Sonya, you're not fooling me again. You don't even
have any gas pumps." She sure got a kick out of that!
Labels: good service
Donatos
I had lunch today at one of the new style Donatos. In these restaurants, you don't have a waitress to take your order; you use a phone at the table to call your order back to the kitchen. Not to be too subtle about it, this just plain sucks. The kitchen staff are slow to respond to the call (I had to apply my patented evil eye on the slacker at the counter before he threw up his hands and went to answer the call), and they aren't overly familiar with the menu. One of my co-workers literally read the menu to him, and he still wanted to argue over the availability of Honey French salad dressing. They seem to have trouble hearing correctly over the ambient noise of the kitchen, and the order had to be repeated multiple times. And they
still got it wrong. Besides that, they have no skin in the game as they have no hope in hell of sharing the tip, should there actually be one. Without the tip being in play, it costs them nothing to screw up.
My lunch was the usual: it looked nothing like the picture in the menu. You know what I'm talking about: you'll see a nice, tall, crisp looking sandwich in the menu, and you actually get a plate with sandwich ingredients strewn all over the place, only passably taking the form of a sandwich. Fluids like sauce and/or other condiments are dripping all over the place, making the actual consumption of the offensive meal a messy affair.
From now on, I think it's delivery only if I ever want Donatos again.
Labels: Bad Service
Employee Breaks
Ok, I worked in food service. For three years when I was in high school, I cooked pizza. Fridays and Saturdays were tough: 5 pm to close. "Close" meant 3am. The restaurant would get so crowded that people were stacked up in the foyer, and pizzas were lined up waiting to get to the ovens. We each got one 30 minute break to grab a quick bite or just to unwind. I tell you this to set the stage for what comes next.
I've had two recent experiences where I was under served as a customer while employees took their breaks. The worst of the two was at our local KFC. We arrived at around 6:30 pm, apparently on the heels of a dinner rush. They were "out of" the original recipe chicken preferred by my family, there was no drinking water in the cooler, and there was not a single clean table available. In fact, the entire place was a filthy mess. We got our second-choice food, went without water despite having asked twice to have the cooler refilled, and wiped off a table with napkins just to have at least a moderately clean place to eat.
We did this in plain sight of a group of four employees sitting in a booth having a break. We did this in plain sight of the manager and a couple of other employees leaning around and BS-ing back in the kitchen. We did this on our
last visit ever to that restaurant!
When we took our breaks at the pizza place, we did it one at a time, we did it when there was no impact on customer service, and we did it in the back of the kitchen where customers could not see us. In fact, if we wanted to eat in the dining room, the requirements were that there were no customers waiting to be seated, and we had to change into street clothes. Was that difficult? Sure it was! But it was an introduction to how things should be in the service industry: the needs of the customer should
always come first. Our local KFC ignored that fundamental service industry tenet, and our local KFC has irretrievably lost our business as a result. Fast food restaurants are fungible - we'll just drive a few more miles in a different direction if we decide we want KFC again. When will these people learn??
Labels: Bad Service
