Saturday, April 10, 2010

April 02 Wake Up Call - Bad Service Soapbox

Last night I thought I would be nice to the wife and offered to take care of dinner for the family. She was slightly disappointed that she was not going to get to cook but took me up on the offer. So I loaded the family into the ole family wagon and took everyone to one of our 10,000 restaurants we have in this city. Now the reason I chose this particular one is because on Thursdays, kids get to eat for 99 cents, and when you have three hungry boys to feed, that’s a deal! Now I do not want to get off on a soapbox here but…


I was rather disappointed when I left this place of business last night. As we entered the establishment we were greeted with a warm and friendly welcome from a slightly attractive young lady and that is where the good part of our experience ended. After being shown to our table we waited for SEVERAL minutes until finally a manager came over and asked if she could take our drink order, which at that time we had already decided on what we wanted to eat and informed her that we wanted to order food as well. Taken by surprise, she hesitated and then decided to go ahead and take our food and drink order. A few minutes later our server finally arrived and delivered our drinks and informed us that our orders had been placed. Eventually our food arrived, delivered by our server, which was a good thing because we needed refills on our drinks so she took care of that. As we were eating our dinner, our server checked on us once. We all finished our dinner and was chatting with each other and after several minutes we decided we were ready to depart and realized we had not seen our server in quite a long time. After waiting several more minutes we finally flagged down another server and asked if he could find our server so that we could get our check and pay. Shortly she arrived and put the check on the table at which point I handed her my credit card. She promptly returned with my card and tickets to sign which I did leaving absolutely NO tip! Now I usually will leave a tip of some amount after getting poor service if the food is good, but however the food at this place is not all that great and the only reason we go is because it is cheap and can get halfway decent service usually by an attractive young lady.

I am not going to say that service is always bad at all places, but there is a decline in the quality of service in the “service” industry. Now I can complain about this because I work in the service industry and have for a long time, I have also worked in the food industry both fast food and sit down type restaurants and I know the standards we were held to several years ago as far as quality and promptness of service and it is just not there these days especially among the high school, college age generation and I fear that it is going to decline even more if we are not careful. It seems kids these days just want a check and heaven forbid if you ask them to work for it. Moms and dads just hand over to their kids any and everything they want and do not instill the sense of responsibility that goes with earning what you have and taking pride in what you do.

Take a look around and think back into history, each generation gets lazier and lazier and it is because we let them sit around the house and play on the gameboy or computer and do not make then get out and do anything anymore. Face it, what would your kids reaction be if you slapped an eight foot sack on their shoulder and told them to pick a row of cotton, for that what would your reaction be if someone handed you a cotton sack and pointed the way to the cotton field. Our great-grandparents were not too good to do it so why are you? Have you seen the movie Wall-E? We laugh and think that is a cute kiddie movie but that is where we are headed if we are not careful. But come to think of it, they did get good service. However that is just my opinion, you can take it and 99 cents and go order off the dollar menu at McDonald’s, if you can get someone to take your order. Just don’t ask for fries, that is another 5 minutes.

Quote of the day:

I think I may have used this before but I am going to use it again because it fits with our topic of discussion.
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks too much like work”. – Thomas Edison. Boy wouldn’t he like to take a look around today!

Well friends, I am quickly running out of time so we are going to wrap this up the right way.

The views and opinions expressed on this show are those of the host, guest and fans and not necessarily those of any organization represented by these people. Wake up call is a production of free speech communications and may be replayed at any time for your viewing pleasure. The contents of this show are meant to be only entertaining and possibly sarcastic. Should you have any issues or questions regarding this show you are encouraged to forward any and all comments to my facebook account.

That is it, I am running out of time, have a wonderful day and weekend, and God bless!

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