It's All About the Service People

It’s ALL About the Service PEOPLE!

I have worked in several jobs throughout the years. Be it be an gas station attendant, or working hand-in-hand with a physician, there is one rule that applies to all……It’s all about the service.

Last night was an example about BAD service. My husband and I decided to go to a “commercial” restaurant for dinner. We don’t do this very often, but this place had an awesome deal on a prime-rib dinner. I should have been suspicious when we walked in, the place didn’t seem extremely busy, but the waitress handed us our menu’s and told us to “go over here and choose and table”. Dilemma: Table #1, still dirty. Table #2, still dirty. Table #3, still dirty. Score, Table #4 appeared to be cleaned off, so we took it!

Next after some time had passed, she came over with a wet cloth and wiped our table. Okay, maybe I guessed wrong, it wasn’t clean, but at least it “kind of” was now. Then she took our orders (from our sticky, yes sticky menus). We both ordered prime rib, baked potatoes with EXTRA butter and the fixings that go along with it; steamed vegetable and your choice of bread. I ordered a smaller end cut so that I could also have shrimp with my dinner. Now I don’t claim to be a professional cook, but prime rib is usually cooked ahead of time (no additional prep needed, other than just slicing and plating it), and baked potatoes are also cooked, kept in a warmer and ready to be served. This was a pretty uncomplicated order and shouldn’t take much to get it out.

Key the  Jeopardy final question music. It is taking forever for our dinner to arrive. I get out my cell phone and even play Words with Friends with my husband who is sitting across from me. The restaurant still isn’t that busy. Did I mention there are at least two other servers as well and that we didn’t even get there until almost 8 pm? Not exactly rush hour for dinner time. Okay, I’ll cut to the chase, finally after a minimum of 30 minutes (in reality it was probably longer), we finally get our meal. The gal doesn’t bring our bread, and forgets the shrimp. (We gently remind her of this.) She goes back and looks like she has to place the order for shrimp. About 10 minutes later my shrimp shows up, along with an extra order that we didn’t place for my husband. The meat was surprisingly pretty good, but the vegetables could have been “nuked” just a tad bit longer. Oh yeah, we have to remind her about the extra butter again.

Now it seems that she has served us, we are completely off her radar. No coming back to see how we are doing. No refilling out water glasses. It’s like she disappeared off the face of the planet. Now the wait  begins. We have finished our meal. Key the  Jeopardy final question music again. No waitress, no bill. I would like a doggy bag as I have extra shrimp to take home. Wait….there’s the waitress. She’s at the table in front of us, and doesn’t even look our way and she’s flitting back and forth between a few other tables and chatting with the cook. I see her walk right past us and completely ignore us again. Apparently the table behind us (the man appeared to be a regular as everyone knew him, or possibly a manager) waves her over and tells her to take care of us. He was in my husband’s view, and my husband said this man  had to waved at her at least four times to get her to come over to him. Now we have our waitress back. We get our doggy bag and bill and abra cadabra she’s gone again. Sure, maybe we would have ordered dessert, but she didn’t ask. We wait a bit, but decide to just walk to the cash register and pay our bill. (We weren’t given instructions if she would take care of it, or if we needed to.)

Moral of the story, no matter how good (or sometimes) bad your end product is, rather is be the most awesome doctor on the planet, (but he consistently runs and hour late for his appointments), or a good meal (with an inattentive waitress), unless your service is good, chances are you won’t be going back. It is always important to give good service, but in this economy, it’s extremely important to give GREAT SERVICE to keep the customer coming back.