I run a marketplace ( http://doleaf.com ) and this is something we try to get across to our sellers. Some of them have really draconian return policies, and maybe they have good reason. But, to the buyers, all kinds of "NO NO NO NO" all over the page is really a turn off.
This is kind of an aside, but if you get the time sometime, I'd love to see a blog post of how things are going with DoLeaf. I remember the posting about your beta awhile back, and it's good to see how much progress you've made since then.
One main thing we've learned in the past couple months: Social media marketing may be the talk of the town these days, but you just can't beat basic SEO for bootstrapping yourself to some sales.
Then again, sometimes, a few lonely rain drops can be the harbinger of a monsoon. It's worth having balance in this as in all things. Don't just shrug things off if it can go from an ignorable nuisance to a major disaster - but don't react emotionally to a perfectly rational problem.
the other side of this is that you need to craft your services and policies so that you are not attractive to troublemakers. For example, at one time I had a 'first month free' policy. Good god. I think maybe 1 customer in 5 was legitimate, and my 95th percentile got absolutely destroyed (and this was back when I was paying sucker rates for bandwidth.)
If he'd ever worked in a cafe or coffee shop that didn't have those rules, he'd want them plastered up on the wall.
First of all, you get the pissy customers who come in to take every one of life's problems out on someone who can't retaliate for fear of losing their job. Secondly, you get the customers who blatantly try to steal; they'll order ABC at $2.79 but when it's being made, they'll say they ordered DEF at $4.79 and that they're making the order wrong. The time to speak up isn't when you've paid and it's half-way made, it's when you visibly see them enter it wrong, however these people know it wasn't entered wrong.
From time to time, you'll occasionally get a variant of type 1, who'll come into the store and order their coffee wrong (ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different), they'll then proceed to swear at the staff in front of a line of customers. As a customer, I've had to tell these people to leave before and I've seen several others who've had to do it; it's flat out being a bad person and when these people have shirts and ties and company logo's plastered on their vehicles, they deserve to be fired because I'll never use their company. I expect more out of someone in a business suit, and I frequently see worse language and behaviour than anyone else.
I know for a fact that if I ran my own cafe/coffee shop, I'd have those exact rules. I wouldn't have them plastered on the wall, but they'd sure as hell be enforced on any jackasses who don't know how to behave in public. Life has rules and boundaries, and far too many people don't understand this. I was taught this in childhood, I assume everyone else was, but mature fully grown adults don't seem to grasp this.
I've seen this behaviour in convenience stores and supermarkets, in the lobbies of companies and in high-end restaurants, and all of their responses are: please leave the premises, and in the case of the swearing psycho's they've had the police called on them. I've heard even more stories about this going on. So why a small diner can't enforce the same rules is well beyond me. I've seen at dentist offices that they'll kick out the people chatting or texting away on their blackberries for no other reason than it's annoying to both staff and the others waiting.
There's an established etiquette in the world, just like there's an established etiquette on HN and anywhere. I don't go into a full-out swearing tirade against PG for some perceived wrong caused by myself, no one else does either. Why people believe they don't have to follow the rules is beyond me, and I believe these people should be punished to the full extent the law allows because the law is there to punish those that don't follow societally established rules and boundaries, AKA societal etiquette.
If I try to rip you off, I expect you to deny me service.
If I swear at you endlessly, I expect you to deny me service.
If I'm misusing your property, I expect you to deny me service.
I'm sorry, to me these are a given and don't need to be up on a wall. For way too many people, it's not a given.
You're talking about punishing wrong-doers. Of course! But the real point is not punishing the rest.
At CD Baby, we had thieves with stolen credit cards every single day.
We'd usually catch them through a quick real-human scanning process we'd do before packing any orders. (Is it out of character? A $1000 order going to Nigeria? Etc.)
About once a week, someone got away with it. We'd constantly improve our methods, but always behind-the-scenes, never making shopping hell for the honest. Just made it our responsibility to deal with the thieves without bothering the rest.
In your coffee shop example: if someone is stealing or screaming then yes of course you deal with that person when it happens.
But no need to accuse everyone and make coffee hell for everyone else.
Besides, no plastic sign will stop the immoral or insane.
I personally wouldn't have the warnings plastered up, I understand why someone would but personally it's not my style.
I'm generally a nice person, however I typically follow a one-strike and you're out rule. I don't expect second chances, and I've typically worked in industries where second chances are rare to come by when you make a mistake personally or professionally. I choose not to work store-front or public relation jobs. I can handle a person, I can't handle a hundred. I know if I owned a store or food place, I'd likely have rather draconian rules even if they're not on the walls.
It sounds like the diner owner in question may be of a rather anti-social disposition, but he chose the wrong job for it. I had the luck of being in jobs where my attitude rather helped, I remember having to tell one person that what they wanted was illegal (against the building code), that I wouldn't touch it and if they found another guy to do it that he'd be liable and the customer would, at best, have to pay out thousands to have the job redone when they went to sell the house, and at worst could be prosecuted too. Telling that to someone got me their respect, if I'd basically said the same Go F Yourself to a customer in a store, I'd have likely lost their service.
I'm not a native English speaker and have never lived in the USA, so I'm having a hard time understanding this:
(ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different)
Are you saying that "coffee, no cream, no sugar" will be understood as "two coffees: one without cream, one without sugar"? That seems... unexpected. I can easily imagine myself making that mistake.
I'm a native English speaker and lived in the US my whole life and this makes no sense to me either. I think it means that coffee automatically comes with one unit of cream and one unit sugar and that saying "no cream no sugar" is insufficient to remove them; instead you have to know the magic phrase "black coffee". My guess that the parent poster is only familiar with their local (NYC?) coffee culture where a regular coffee always comes with cream and sugar and thinks it applies everywhere else too.
In any rate, it doesn't matter at the vast majority of places where I order coffee because they won't even add cream and sugar for me if I ask for them-- I have to add them myself from a side counter.
I agree, electromagnetic's insistence may be a generational or regional thing.
I've mainly ordered coffee in west coast cafes where you add your own milk/cream/sugar. I see the efficiency of saying "black coffee", but it's never been a habit -- I say "small coffee" and expect to get it black. In NY or Boston, this has sometimes led to disappointment.
Here if you were ordering from Tim Hortons or McDonalds, or other fast-food place saying "small coffee" would get you a small black coffee. They never put anything in without a request, however saying 'no cream' or 'no sugar' sounds like a request.
I've noticed here it's typically worse with the older staffers in stores, which only forces the behaviour onto younger employee's. In downtown Toronto or Hamilton some of the Tim Hortons are barely different from a vending machine. I've seen lines 30+ people long.
I live in Canada and this is the norm from Toronto, to the smallest cafe in a backwater town (and I've been in coffee shops on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere). I'm from the UK, and this was the norm of my experience there too.
Here's the basics for here: Black Coffee, gets you a black coffee. Adding 'regular' gets you 1 cream and 1 sugar, 'double double' gets you two of both, 'triple triple' and 'four by four' respectively get you 3 of both and 4 of both. If you add 'with milk', you'll get the respective amount with milk and sugar, similarly if you add 'with sweetener' you'll get it the respective amount of artificial sweetener. If you use these words, it'll never be your mistake.
Tim Horton's (the biggest coffee shop chain in Canada) teaches their workers these words, and they have specific buttons on their tills to ring it in like that. McDonalds and anywhere else that serves coffee teaches their workers the same here. Starbucks might be different, I wouldn't know through the faux-italian crap.
"No cream, no sugar" means no cream and no sugar -- what else could it mean?. I'm really not seeing your point here. I don't think the customers who say that are necessarily being deliberately difficult. (FWIW, I'm English, now living in the US, and to me this does not seem like a strange way of ordering a black coffee -- especially since just saying "black coffee" leaves it open as to whether or not you want sugar.)
Everyone who wants a black coffee says "Black Coffee" or "Coffee, Black", the word 'black' is the keyword here for how you get your coffee. When a worker hears "Coffee, no cream, no sugar" what they're actually hearing is 'Coffee' 'Cream' and 'Sugar', the no isn't a keyword to them and you'll get a coffee with one cream and one sugar just because you said the words. Without those words, you'd have gotten what you wanted.
When you can say in 2 words exactly what you want, you shouldn't be using 5.
So, you're saying that when a customer says a phrase with unambiguous meaning, it's excusable for an employee to misinterpret it as a similar, but more common phrase simply because they aren't actually listening to the customer? When you're taking orders, your entire job is to listen to what the customer actually says, not what you expect them to say. If you're half asleep and acting on reflex and as a result you screw up, you deserve to get yelled at by the customer and your boss, because you've failed to do your job.
I'm quite aware of the psychology research that's been done and discussed here recently regarding cashiers operating on auto-pilot and reflexively asking "You want fries with that?" after a customer orders fries. These kind of mistakes are common, and to be expected. That doesn't change the fact that you're being paid to not make those mistakes, and if you don't have the mental discipline to catch those mistakes, you aren't fit for the job.
> When you can say in 2 words exactly what you want, you shouldn't be using 5.
Right, because human beings should strive to be as efficient as possible and throw anything that isn't as efficient as possible. Love? Too inefficient! Socializing? Not getting enough work done! 5 words instead of 2? I'm so embarrassed that that seppuku is the only option!
> When a worker hears "Coffee, no cream, no sugar" what they're actually hearing is 'Coffee' 'Cream' and 'Sugar',
So you're saying that the workers aren't paying any attention to what the customer is actually saying, and that it's definitely the customer's fault for not knowing the 'secret code' of the coffeeshop?
Pay attention. I certainly wouldn't yell but if you got the order wrong because you didn't understand what I was saying I would ask for the proper order. Even if the wording was redundant the message was clear that the person wants black coffee - you were too spaced out to put the information together.
I think the point is that if you want black coffee, there's no reason to say "cream" or "sugar" in the first place. "Coffee, one cream, one sugar" is a common phrase, and it's pretty to see how someone would think they heard that from the original phrase.
He's saying that when you order coffee you order you can order:
"black coffee"
-> This is coffee without any thing added ( that's what the 'black' part means )
but
"black coffee, no cream, no sugar"
-> is confusing because it is redundant. Sleepy baristas and dinner waiters/waitresses will hear that and think:
"coffee with cream and sugar" because, why would you order "black coffee, no cream, no sugar" it makes no sense.
This is exactly what I'm saying, why so many people here on HN seem to be so willing to accept redundancy in a business that is streamlined to provide fast service is beyond me.
Tim Hortons here in Canada holds ~70% of the market share (IIRC), compared to Starbucks' 7% in second place. You can literally order and have a coffee in the time it takes you to pay (one person is on the cash, the other is making your order by overhearing). Today the store close to me made over 300 breakfast sandwiches (bagel/tea biscuit, bacon/sausage/egg or any combination) in 4 hours.
Including redundancies in your order causes complications and the ability to induce error. Why this isn't simple to understand for so many people here, I don't know.
Coffee here in Canada is always served black. Stating 'no cream' or 'no sugar' sounds like 'one cream' or 'one sugar' to the person making the drink (note: NOT the person you ordered from). The person making drinks can have to deal with upwards of 100 coffees during a 10-minute rush, this means less than 6 seconds per coffee. When they get a pre-work rush at 6am, and the staff serving you have been working since 10PM, there's no chance in hell they'll spend 6 seconds listening to you order your coffee when it takes them that long to make it. That 10-minute rush will be backlogged to taking 20 minutes.
I'm not even discussing the people that order like that through a crackly 10-year-old drive-thru intercom and expect their order to be interpreted properly.
Perhaps it's an American thing that orders take needlessly long to be served and are needlessly complicated. I can't order a drink at Starbucks without being forced through an impossible discussion, or listing off a grocery list. Similar happens at McDonalds here in Canada, a simple 2-item order can take a solid 10 minutes to be dealt with. I've seen orders at Tim Hortons of >20 items be processed and served within 2 minutes.
Interesting. I had no idea that the Canadian lifestyle is so marked by streamlined efficiency that it puts American fast-food chains to shame.
I live in Finland. The cliché about Finns is that they are stolid and quiet... But the upside of the "default silence" is that people generally pay attention when someone is talking. It feels very foreign that I would accidentally get both milk and sugar in my coffee because the person behind the counter wasn't actually listening to me, but instead just detecting keywords in my speech.
The customer didn't choose, install, nor maintain the drive-thru intercom. If it's insufficient for the business purpose, fix it, but don't blame the customer. They have a reasonable expectation that the intercom works as well as the average speakerphone.
I spent 5 years in retail, and you're taking it way too personally. Dealing with assholes is part of the job, and there's a teachable series of steps that don't involve treating every customer with suspicion.
- It's not you. The first thing I was taught was that my customers have just spent an hour dragging two screaming toddlers around the store, they're approaching my checkout like an unexploded bomb. Part of my job is to defuse that, greet them with a smile. If they complain or snarl, listen reasonably and respond professionally. 99% of people who come across as jerks are just having a bad day, and often snap out of it with the right treatment. On the other side, if someone doesn't, don't feel bad, they don't even see you, it's all stuff in their head not anything you did.
- Quarantine. If someone is being abusive or swearing, have someone to escalate it to, and move it to a corner or other area away from the customer flow. Let them rant, try to listen to what they're saying, and offer to do something about the issues with concrete steps. Give them a coupon, but make certain you get down their name and address.
- Fire your worst customers. Once you have those names and addresses stored, when a new complaint comes up, check back. If someone's filed three complaints, give them a call or a letter explaining that you're really sorry they're having such a consistently bad experience at your store, maybe they should consider these alternative places to shop?
The trouble with the rules you posit is that they're recipes for escalation, and involve treating every customer with suspicion. There's the occasional true psycho that you end up calling security or the police on, but in almost all cases you can bring customers back to reasonableness. The only cost is to your own pride, but that's where the shield of professionalism comes in. You're treating them extremely well because that's your job, not because you like them.
Does the author live in San Fransisco? Because I see this phenomenon a lot in SF vs other places I've visited. Could have something to do with the abundance of homelessness in that city but the restrooms esp. seem to be locked down like Ft. Knox. For a city with such a liberal reputation they sure act like a bunch of A holes in that respect.
If SF weren't such a liberal city, it would have far fewer homeless. Part of the problem is all the services that San Francisco provides to people down on their luck. It makes the city a good place to live if you have nowhere to live. But some shop owners have lost their patience, and I don't blame them. I think I'd lose my patience too, after having to hose human feces off of the sidewalk outside my store several mornings in a row. In some parts of the city (like the Haight, anywhere near GG Park), it's gotten pretty bad.
I think that most outside poopers are severely mentally ill and untreated or severely drugged out.
I think the notion that these people are like characters in the Sims where they tried super hard to get to the nearest city-provided restroom or various public restrooms like the ubiquitous McDonalds in SF -- yet they could not make it in time so they reluctantly pooped on the sidewalk is very naive.
Granted, it could be long lines -- I don't have the data either.
"If SF weren't such a liberal city, it would have far fewer homeless."
Sorry, but that's an argument that you have to prove, with actual facts. You can't simply assert your worldview to be true.
Could the homelessness problem in SF be caused by excessive social services? Sure, I suppose it could. But it could also easily be caused by the incredibly moderate weather (which makes it possible to live on the streets year-round, without fear of freezing to death -- many cities with moderate climates have similar problems). Or, for that matter, the homelessness problem could be due to the absolutely insane cost of living, and a lack of social services.
I don't know the cause of the problem, but I'd still wager that it's a bit more complicated than a simple-minded theory involving the politics of the city government. I also question the premise of any theory that assumes that the homeless and mentally ill (neither of whom are highly mobile populations) are packing up and heading west explicitly to take advantage of the "liberal" social services in San Francisco.
Well, one data point: "38% of homeless survey respondents reported that they first became homeless outside of San Francisco or were relative newcomers, having lived in the City for three months or less." And that's actually a significant decrease from the 2007 survey.
San Diego has much better weather than SF, yet there are no homeless there.
People there are more centrist/republican leaning. So Weather is not the reason bums come to SF. But the lunatic support the city gives to the homeless. Last time they counted, 2/3 of the homeless were not from California at all.
SF, is like a homeless mecca.
And the latter two provide immediately accessible numbers. Alpha Project "is a nonprofit human services organization that serves over 2,000 men, women, and children each day." The Regional Taskforce for Homelessness in San Diego published a 2009 overview (PDF, http://www.rtfhsd.org/pdf/PITC09.pdf) indicating at least 7892 counted within the San Diego area, at least 4338 in San Diego City.
Those are facts, and they took one minute to acquire. If your point was that there were less per capita, I cannot argue with that as I do not have comps.
Also, the article he linked had absolutely nothing to do with homelessness. Even if we assume San Francisco to be a horribly governed place, it doesn't automatically mean that the social services lead to homelessness.
A few years ago, I took a class called "Homelessness an Public Policy" through a San Francisco college. My recollection: There are roughly as many homeless people in SF as there are in New York, even though the overall population of New York is way higher (8 to 10 times higher?). Most likely, part of the reason is the weather. The San Francisco Bay Area is the only part of the US with a Mediterranean climate, which means it is relatively temperate year round. It doesn't get that cold in the winter, it doesn't get that hot in the summer. Iirc, the average daytime temperature in Napa is 60 - 80 degrees Fahrenheit year round. I was in Solano County at the time and we had much hotter weather in the summer. I went to San Francisco for a medical test in June. It was in the nineties in Fairfield. It was 30 degrees cooler in San Francisco. I made sure to take a jacket. I still was uncomfortably cold. Extremes of heat and cold both kill homeless people. So the weather/climate probably has a lot more to do with the high levels of homelessness in San Francisco than the political climate.
I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by 9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building, instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am, because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be fired".
So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this one.
In one of my early post-college jobs I landed at a small startup. We had something like 6 employees at the time. As my wife was still in PhD school, I was commuting a pretty good distance. So I figured: "I'll just start every day at home, make the drive after rush hour and leave for home before rush hour hits." I was essentially in the office for about 5 hours a day.
Lasted about a week before the MBA in the building pulled me aside and told me that wasn't going to work. The reason: the customer support guy also lived a long way out and he thought it wasn't fair that I was doing this.
Of course, one of the very reasons I was drawn to programming in the first place was the flexibility it came with as a job. I could be productive from almost anywhere... and why shouldn't I be? From my perspective, if he didn't like it, well he should think about a career change.
Now this was early 2002, which some might remember was a terrible time for actually finding jobs... so I reluctantly gave in. My commute went from roughly 30 minutes each way to 1-2 hours. I was miserable. That all changed after about a year as the company grew and I gradually slipped back into a better driving schedule.
It's still something that sticks with me today. Now that I own the company, I promote a results oriented environment that gives everyone the flexibility to come and go as they please. Sure we sometimes have to get everyone together for meetings, but it's hardly been an issue so far.
Like with so many things in life, it helps to be the type of person who can take a step back and reflect objectively, rather than reflexively reacting to everything. It seems that far too many lack this ability, or at least haven't learned it.
Offtopic: It's a small world. I went to the same little school as Derek, albeit much later. Now I know why we could only drink water at lunch.
Making changes to addressing problems only when they occur is part of agile development. The problem here is that the change is an extreme one, that generalizes from one instance to all. But how do you tell how much you should generalize?
A starting point is raw statistics: if you have 1000 customers, and 1 has this problem, should you fix it? Then, account for consequences: how serious is that one problem (what is its cost to you, to the person, to the community)? Finally, what are the knock-on effects, looking at the big overall picture: will addressing this problem improve your business overall, or undermine it? (sometimes, that 1 in a 1000 problem is a good excuse to fix something, or a signal to grow in that direction).
Then, you can think about the best way to address the problem. Nasty prohibitive signs probably don't help; even nice prohibitive signs probably don't help either. Sometimes, you can reorganize how you do things so that the problem cannot occur (e.g. when training animals to not do something, you can train them to do something that is incompatible with the undesired action; e.g. floppy disks are shaped so that they cannot be inserted in the wrong way).
The owner of a prominent software respository site told me that no matter what you write on forms - or how you highlight it - people will simply not read it.
BTW: Sometimes the sign has underlining and exclamation marks added in a different colour, apparently upon second and third infractions. Exasperation marks.
Once I took a mini vacation up to a natural hot spring resort. I'd heard it was a relaxed, hippie-ish, communal living place. When we arrived there were just signs absolutely everywhere, in big letters at face level on all doors. Where to take your shoes off, where to be quiet, where to put your food in the kitchen, how to use the communal food shelves, where you had to wear clothes, where to line up for dinner.
None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I wasn't sure about.
Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should have had a sign about that.
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadOne main thing we've learned in the past couple months: Social media marketing may be the talk of the town these days, but you just can't beat basic SEO for bootstrapping yourself to some sales.
I also posted an item here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 Upvotes would be appreciated
First of all, you get the pissy customers who come in to take every one of life's problems out on someone who can't retaliate for fear of losing their job. Secondly, you get the customers who blatantly try to steal; they'll order ABC at $2.79 but when it's being made, they'll say they ordered DEF at $4.79 and that they're making the order wrong. The time to speak up isn't when you've paid and it's half-way made, it's when you visibly see them enter it wrong, however these people know it wasn't entered wrong.
From time to time, you'll occasionally get a variant of type 1, who'll come into the store and order their coffee wrong (ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different), they'll then proceed to swear at the staff in front of a line of customers. As a customer, I've had to tell these people to leave before and I've seen several others who've had to do it; it's flat out being a bad person and when these people have shirts and ties and company logo's plastered on their vehicles, they deserve to be fired because I'll never use their company. I expect more out of someone in a business suit, and I frequently see worse language and behaviour than anyone else.
I know for a fact that if I ran my own cafe/coffee shop, I'd have those exact rules. I wouldn't have them plastered on the wall, but they'd sure as hell be enforced on any jackasses who don't know how to behave in public. Life has rules and boundaries, and far too many people don't understand this. I was taught this in childhood, I assume everyone else was, but mature fully grown adults don't seem to grasp this.
I've seen this behaviour in convenience stores and supermarkets, in the lobbies of companies and in high-end restaurants, and all of their responses are: please leave the premises, and in the case of the swearing psycho's they've had the police called on them. I've heard even more stories about this going on. So why a small diner can't enforce the same rules is well beyond me. I've seen at dentist offices that they'll kick out the people chatting or texting away on their blackberries for no other reason than it's annoying to both staff and the others waiting.
There's an established etiquette in the world, just like there's an established etiquette on HN and anywhere. I don't go into a full-out swearing tirade against PG for some perceived wrong caused by myself, no one else does either. Why people believe they don't have to follow the rules is beyond me, and I believe these people should be punished to the full extent the law allows because the law is there to punish those that don't follow societally established rules and boundaries, AKA societal etiquette.
If I try to rip you off, I expect you to deny me service. If I swear at you endlessly, I expect you to deny me service. If I'm misusing your property, I expect you to deny me service.
I'm sorry, to me these are a given and don't need to be up on a wall. For way too many people, it's not a given.
At CD Baby, we had thieves with stolen credit cards every single day.
We'd usually catch them through a quick real-human scanning process we'd do before packing any orders. (Is it out of character? A $1000 order going to Nigeria? Etc.)
About once a week, someone got away with it. We'd constantly improve our methods, but always behind-the-scenes, never making shopping hell for the honest. Just made it our responsibility to deal with the thieves without bothering the rest.
In your coffee shop example: if someone is stealing or screaming then yes of course you deal with that person when it happens.
But no need to accuse everyone and make coffee hell for everyone else.
Besides, no plastic sign will stop the immoral or insane.
I'm generally a nice person, however I typically follow a one-strike and you're out rule. I don't expect second chances, and I've typically worked in industries where second chances are rare to come by when you make a mistake personally or professionally. I choose not to work store-front or public relation jobs. I can handle a person, I can't handle a hundred. I know if I owned a store or food place, I'd likely have rather draconian rules even if they're not on the walls.
It sounds like the diner owner in question may be of a rather anti-social disposition, but he chose the wrong job for it. I had the luck of being in jobs where my attitude rather helped, I remember having to tell one person that what they wanted was illegal (against the building code), that I wouldn't touch it and if they found another guy to do it that he'd be liable and the customer would, at best, have to pay out thousands to have the job redone when they went to sell the house, and at worst could be prosecuted too. Telling that to someone got me their respect, if I'd basically said the same Go F Yourself to a customer in a store, I'd have likely lost their service.
(ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different)
Are you saying that "coffee, no cream, no sugar" will be understood as "two coffees: one without cream, one without sugar"? That seems... unexpected. I can easily imagine myself making that mistake.
In any rate, it doesn't matter at the vast majority of places where I order coffee because they won't even add cream and sugar for me if I ask for them-- I have to add them myself from a side counter.
I've mainly ordered coffee in west coast cafes where you add your own milk/cream/sugar. I see the efficiency of saying "black coffee", but it's never been a habit -- I say "small coffee" and expect to get it black. In NY or Boston, this has sometimes led to disappointment.
I've noticed here it's typically worse with the older staffers in stores, which only forces the behaviour onto younger employee's. In downtown Toronto or Hamilton some of the Tim Hortons are barely different from a vending machine. I've seen lines 30+ people long.
It sounds like a request not to have cream or sugar!
Here's the basics for here: Black Coffee, gets you a black coffee. Adding 'regular' gets you 1 cream and 1 sugar, 'double double' gets you two of both, 'triple triple' and 'four by four' respectively get you 3 of both and 4 of both. If you add 'with milk', you'll get the respective amount with milk and sugar, similarly if you add 'with sweetener' you'll get it the respective amount of artificial sweetener. If you use these words, it'll never be your mistake.
Tim Horton's (the biggest coffee shop chain in Canada) teaches their workers these words, and they have specific buttons on their tills to ring it in like that. McDonalds and anywhere else that serves coffee teaches their workers the same here. Starbucks might be different, I wouldn't know through the faux-italian crap.
When you can say in 2 words exactly what you want, you shouldn't be using 5.
I'm quite aware of the psychology research that's been done and discussed here recently regarding cashiers operating on auto-pilot and reflexively asking "You want fries with that?" after a customer orders fries. These kind of mistakes are common, and to be expected. That doesn't change the fact that you're being paid to not make those mistakes, and if you don't have the mental discipline to catch those mistakes, you aren't fit for the job.
Right, because human beings should strive to be as efficient as possible and throw anything that isn't as efficient as possible. Love? Too inefficient! Socializing? Not getting enough work done! 5 words instead of 2? I'm so embarrassed that that seppuku is the only option!
> When a worker hears "Coffee, no cream, no sugar" what they're actually hearing is 'Coffee' 'Cream' and 'Sugar',
So you're saying that the workers aren't paying any attention to what the customer is actually saying, and that it's definitely the customer's fault for not knowing the 'secret code' of the coffeeshop?
"black coffee" -> This is coffee without any thing added ( that's what the 'black' part means )
but
"black coffee, no cream, no sugar" -> is confusing because it is redundant. Sleepy baristas and dinner waiters/waitresses will hear that and think: "coffee with cream and sugar" because, why would you order "black coffee, no cream, no sugar" it makes no sense.
Tim Hortons here in Canada holds ~70% of the market share (IIRC), compared to Starbucks' 7% in second place. You can literally order and have a coffee in the time it takes you to pay (one person is on the cash, the other is making your order by overhearing). Today the store close to me made over 300 breakfast sandwiches (bagel/tea biscuit, bacon/sausage/egg or any combination) in 4 hours.
Including redundancies in your order causes complications and the ability to induce error. Why this isn't simple to understand for so many people here, I don't know.
Coffee here in Canada is always served black. Stating 'no cream' or 'no sugar' sounds like 'one cream' or 'one sugar' to the person making the drink (note: NOT the person you ordered from). The person making drinks can have to deal with upwards of 100 coffees during a 10-minute rush, this means less than 6 seconds per coffee. When they get a pre-work rush at 6am, and the staff serving you have been working since 10PM, there's no chance in hell they'll spend 6 seconds listening to you order your coffee when it takes them that long to make it. That 10-minute rush will be backlogged to taking 20 minutes.
I'm not even discussing the people that order like that through a crackly 10-year-old drive-thru intercom and expect their order to be interpreted properly.
Perhaps it's an American thing that orders take needlessly long to be served and are needlessly complicated. I can't order a drink at Starbucks without being forced through an impossible discussion, or listing off a grocery list. Similar happens at McDonalds here in Canada, a simple 2-item order can take a solid 10 minutes to be dealt with. I've seen orders at Tim Hortons of >20 items be processed and served within 2 minutes.
I live in Finland. The cliché about Finns is that they are stolid and quiet... But the upside of the "default silence" is that people generally pay attention when someone is talking. It feels very foreign that I would accidentally get both milk and sugar in my coffee because the person behind the counter wasn't actually listening to me, but instead just detecting keywords in my speech.
- It's not you. The first thing I was taught was that my customers have just spent an hour dragging two screaming toddlers around the store, they're approaching my checkout like an unexploded bomb. Part of my job is to defuse that, greet them with a smile. If they complain or snarl, listen reasonably and respond professionally. 99% of people who come across as jerks are just having a bad day, and often snap out of it with the right treatment. On the other side, if someone doesn't, don't feel bad, they don't even see you, it's all stuff in their head not anything you did.
- Quarantine. If someone is being abusive or swearing, have someone to escalate it to, and move it to a corner or other area away from the customer flow. Let them rant, try to listen to what they're saying, and offer to do something about the issues with concrete steps. Give them a coupon, but make certain you get down their name and address.
- Fire your worst customers. Once you have those names and addresses stored, when a new complaint comes up, check back. If someone's filed three complaints, give them a call or a letter explaining that you're really sorry they're having such a consistently bad experience at your store, maybe they should consider these alternative places to shop?
The trouble with the rules you posit is that they're recipes for escalation, and involve treating every customer with suspicion. There's the occasional true psycho that you end up calling security or the police on, but in almost all cases you can bring customers back to reasonableness. The only cost is to your own pride, but that's where the shield of professionalism comes in. You're treating them extremely well because that's your job, not because you like them.
Anyway, if I ask for a coffee, no sugar, no cream that is what I will pay for - I don't care what you think it means it is very clear.
If you type something wrong in, that is your problem and I won't pay for that.
You can refuse me service if you want, but I don't care about the problems - those are yours and only yours.
My cat has enough self respect to hold his feces if we accidentally close the door to the laundry room for a while.
I think the notion that these people are like characters in the Sims where they tried super hard to get to the nearest city-provided restroom or various public restrooms like the ubiquitous McDonalds in SF -- yet they could not make it in time so they reluctantly pooped on the sidewalk is very naive.
Granted, it could be long lines -- I don't have the data either.
Sorry, but that's an argument that you have to prove, with actual facts. You can't simply assert your worldview to be true.
Could the homelessness problem in SF be caused by excessive social services? Sure, I suppose it could. But it could also easily be caused by the incredibly moderate weather (which makes it possible to live on the streets year-round, without fear of freezing to death -- many cities with moderate climates have similar problems). Or, for that matter, the homelessness problem could be due to the absolutely insane cost of living, and a lack of social services.
I don't know the cause of the problem, but I'd still wager that it's a bit more complicated than a simple-minded theory involving the politics of the city government. I also question the premise of any theory that assumes that the homeless and mentally ill (neither of whom are highly mobile populations) are packing up and heading west explicitly to take advantage of the "liberal" social services in San Francisco.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/lhcb/homeless_count/...
People there are more centrist/republican leaning. So Weather is not the reason bums come to SF. But the lunatic support the city gives to the homeless. Last time they counted, 2/3 of the homeless were not from California at all. SF, is like a homeless mecca.
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...
I do not live in San Diego, and "there" implies that neither do you. So let's look at facts before making points through assertion?
The top 5 hits for "homeless san diego" yields the following organizations: http://www.sdrescue.org/ http://sdhomeless.org/ http://www.alphaproject.org/ http://www.rtfhsd.org/
And the latter two provide immediately accessible numbers. Alpha Project "is a nonprofit human services organization that serves over 2,000 men, women, and children each day." The Regional Taskforce for Homelessness in San Diego published a 2009 overview (PDF, http://www.rtfhsd.org/pdf/PITC09.pdf) indicating at least 7892 counted within the San Diego area, at least 4338 in San Diego City.
Those are facts, and they took one minute to acquire. If your point was that there were less per capita, I cannot argue with that as I do not have comps.
Also, the article he linked had absolutely nothing to do with homelessness. Even if we assume San Francisco to be a horribly governed place, it doesn't automatically mean that the social services lead to homelessness.
I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by 9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building, instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am, because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be fired".
So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this one.
Lasted about a week before the MBA in the building pulled me aside and told me that wasn't going to work. The reason: the customer support guy also lived a long way out and he thought it wasn't fair that I was doing this.
Of course, one of the very reasons I was drawn to programming in the first place was the flexibility it came with as a job. I could be productive from almost anywhere... and why shouldn't I be? From my perspective, if he didn't like it, well he should think about a career change.
Now this was early 2002, which some might remember was a terrible time for actually finding jobs... so I reluctantly gave in. My commute went from roughly 30 minutes each way to 1-2 hours. I was miserable. That all changed after about a year as the company grew and I gradually slipped back into a better driving schedule.
It's still something that sticks with me today. Now that I own the company, I promote a results oriented environment that gives everyone the flexibility to come and go as they please. Sure we sometimes have to get everyone together for meetings, but it's hardly been an issue so far.
Offtopic: It's a small world. I went to the same little school as Derek, albeit much later. Now I know why we could only drink water at lunch.
A starting point is raw statistics: if you have 1000 customers, and 1 has this problem, should you fix it? Then, account for consequences: how serious is that one problem (what is its cost to you, to the person, to the community)? Finally, what are the knock-on effects, looking at the big overall picture: will addressing this problem improve your business overall, or undermine it? (sometimes, that 1 in a 1000 problem is a good excuse to fix something, or a signal to grow in that direction).
Then, you can think about the best way to address the problem. Nasty prohibitive signs probably don't help; even nice prohibitive signs probably don't help either. Sometimes, you can reorganize how you do things so that the problem cannot occur (e.g. when training animals to not do something, you can train them to do something that is incompatible with the undesired action; e.g. floppy disks are shaped so that they cannot be inserted in the wrong way).
The owner of a prominent software respository site told me that no matter what you write on forms - or how you highlight it - people will simply not read it.
BTW: Sometimes the sign has underlining and exclamation marks added in a different colour, apparently upon second and third infractions. Exasperation marks.
None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I wasn't sure about.
Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should have had a sign about that.