Worst Customer Service I've ever experienced - read this!

A sad but true tale about customer service... Dr. Frankenstein style.

This past Saturday I flew up to Buffalo in order to drive back with my daughter who is a senior communications major at the University of Buffalo. When I touched down she met me at baggage claim and decided to go to a local restaurant for breakfast and so we could get caught up on life. Jordana, my daughter, said she knew the place we should go which was only a 5 minute ride from the frigid Buffalo airport. Upon arrival at The Original House of Pancakes, we parked and walked in the front door.

Note: Jordana had just purchased a $3.00 cappuccino from Panera on the way to pick me up. It was still hot and when we arrived at The Original House of Pancakes and she carried the drink with her into the restaurant so as not to waste her investment.


Upon entering the hostess came up to greet us and the first thing she uttered is, "No food or beverage is permitted to be brought into the restaurant". Whereupon I said, "No, you don't understand, we are here to have breakfast and spend money at your restaurant and my
daughter just spent $3.00 on her cappuccino and she doesn't want to waste it". This tactic was to no avail as the hostess insisted again with certainty that no food or beverage was allowed.

Not being one to give up that easily, I suspected that she was simply young and inexperienced in the ways of common courtesy and so I tried another linguistic maneuver by making a simple request, "Would you please ask the manager to come over so we can have a conversation?"

She walked away and a moment later young man, I'm guessing about 35, walked up to us. Again, I'm thinking to myself as he approached, this is going to be easy, I'm certain that he's going to be a reasonable business person and we'll just be able to sit down and have breakfast, talk, and spend money here.

All of a sudden he morphed from a friendly looking young man in to the Frankenstein of customer service by again stating in no uncertain terms without saying anything else to us, "No food or beverage is allowed to be brought into the restaurant".

Ouch! We stood there in utter disbelief at his approach to handling us and I again tried to persuade him to our way of thinking. We again explained that Jordana had just purchased a $3.00 cappuccino and it was still hot and she didn't want to waste it... and he continued to say, "No food or beverage.... bla bla bla."

Then I ask him a very direct question about his philosophical approach with respect to his business policy, "Let me get this straight, you're going to turn away a new customer, who wants to spend money in your restaurant, because of this policy?" The manager replied, "Yes". And he
further explained, "My family owns this restaurant and I'm the manager and this is our policy."And I said, "Even if this means that we never come back again?" And he said without blinking, in front of other patrons, "Yes."

We hopped in the car and drove 1/4 mile down the road to a Bob Evans restaurant, which I explained to Jordana, was a huge chain operation. Upon getting out of the car, we decided to do a marketing experiment by bringing the infamous cappuccino into the Bob Evans restaurant just to see what would happen.

The answer... NOTHING. The lovely hostess took us to a nice table, we ordered breakfast. Spent about $25 with tip and left satisfied.

Just before we left, I asked to speak with the manager, Mr. Colucci , who approached us somewhat cautiously. When we thanked him for the friendly service and good food his face lit up
and he smiled. When we told him of our customer service experiment, he explained that the
manager/owner of his competitive restaurant had a reputation just like we were describing. In fact, some of his employees use to work at the other place and reported how much they hated working there.

Bob Evans - THE GOOD GUYS!