Woman Helps Her Dad Out At His Restaurant, But When A Customer Comes In After Closing Time, She Chooses To Put The Employees Above The Customer Despite Her Dad’s Decision
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Imagine having your own career but helping your dad out at his restaurant on nights and weekends. If a customer came in after closing time, would you take their order or tell them you’re closed?
In this story, one woman is in this situation, and her dad told the staff to take the customer’s order; however, when she delivered the food to the table, she decided to tell the customer what she really thought.
This story is really about loyalty. If you want your employees to be loyal, don’t make them humor bad customers. She knew that. Her dad, I’m not so sure.
Keep reading for the whole story.
I work at my dad’s place and I just told off a bad customer when he wouldn’t.
And it feels very satisfying.
I’m 34, I started helping my dad with his business a couple years ago, because he’s 70 and needs help.
I have my own totally separate career and basically give all my nights and weekends to his business. That’s family, right?
Their employees sound great, but that’s probably because they’re good employers.
So, he has a lounge and a little restaurant. I cook, do some bookkeeping, occasionally bartend, try to stay away from the public as much as possible, you guys understand why that would be a priority I’m sure.
We have a darn fabulous staff, a handful of twenty-somethings that shine on night after night.
While every other local place churns through waitstaff each month we have kept the same core group of people for years.
They are upstanding, friendly, diligent and fastidious; I love them.
This would be so annoying.
Tonight we got a call five minutes before the kitchen closes asking how late we are open. I’m sure you know how groan worthy that is.
A woman and her son show up ten minutes later. A server apologizes saying the kitchen is closed.
She retorts that she called. (These people!)
Server one comes back into the kitchen to ask me what to do about them.
She’s a repeat offender.
Another server comes back, says this is the fifth time he can remember this woman coming after we close, he’s a gentle guy but clearly upset, you can tell he has felt disrespected by this woman in the past.
My dad comes back tells server one to take their order.
Server two, says, “she’s just going to keep taking advantage, she’s a bad customer.”
Dad repeats “take the order.” So server one leaves. Server two continues his upset dialog about the woman.
OP told the woman her honest thoughts.
So I make the food and personally take it to her table. I make it in perfect form, I don’t believe in compromising someone’s order because they’re not a deserving type of person.
I say to her, “Hey, I need you guys to make sure you don’t ever come in after we close again.”
I hear this and the service-minded part of myself wants to cringe so hard. I want to backtrack and thank them for letting me cater to them, but I hold my ground stoically.
She is shocked, starts up saying that she called etc.
This is why the employees are loyal.
I really could have crumbled at this point, I wanted to just scamper back to the kitchen, BUT I have wielded the power-pause in business negotiations before, and even though this isn’t totally my business I know, and my elderly dad should know, that the greatest asset a business has is a loyal employee, these kids are the face of our company, they could ruin us if they wanted to but they don’t, they show up everyday and take all the nonsense the clientele can dish out, and I thought of the distraught look of server two and I said, deadpan, “I’m serious.”
And she quivered a little bit.
Gosh, she looked embarrassed.
Another dramatic pause and I say, “We’ll be happy to serve you whenever you come on time.” And then I turn and leave.
The server was grateful.
In the back I tell server two about it, who thanks me, which confirms to me it was totally the right choice.
We joke that together we’ll prune our client base until it resembles a decent set of human beings.
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This is kind of par for the course of working at a family business. Sometimes you know your family member is making the wrong choice but the intricate ranking system of family order maintains priority.
I really do aspire to heed my Dad’s requests and to respect his seniority, but when we risk compromising the feelings of our staff there comes a point when that doesn’t make sense.
She did the right thing. If the employer doesn’t respect the server’s time or opinion, he’ll find somewhere else to work. More bosses should put their employees above their customers.
Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
Apparently, there’s a name for telling a customer off.
Calling to ask when a restaurant closes doesn’t give anyone permission to arrive and order after the restaurant is closed!
This would’ve been a good way to handle it.
These owners sound awful.
It’s better to lose a bad customer than a good employee. The woman who wrote this story knows that. She needs to convince her dad to follow the same thought process.
That customer shouldn’t have even been let in the door since she arrived after the restaurant closed. I’m glad OP stood up for the servers.
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