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Yay Denny's

xxmikexx

Entry posted by xxmikexx

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I like to praise vendors in public when they do the right thing, as I did with the FS Pilot Shop a couple of weeks ago ...

 

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A few days ago my wife and I intended to eat breakfast at a local Denny's, a locally owned franchise where we spend roughly $1,000 per year, I estimate. When we walked in there was a young child in a high chair shrieking and crying very loudly. All the mother was doing was shush-ing the child. We sat down, placed our orders and waited for someone on the staff to ask the mother to step outside till the child had calmed down. Nobody did anything.

 

So after we had been in the restaurant for about five minutes I took the law into my own hands, walked over to the mother and told her that she would have to leave the restaurant with the kid till the kid was behaving properly. The mother did as I asked, and as she was heading out the door I sat down again at my wife's and my booth table.

 

Well now ... I heard one of the waitresses go over to the father and apologize for my "rude behavior". She did it several times. So when she returned to the coffee prep station I confronted her. "Did I just hear you telling the father that I had been rude?"

 

"Yes" she said. "You were VERY rude." A second waitress chimed in with "That's OUR job, not yours."

 

Whereupon I told them "But you weren't doing your job, somebody had to, and that somebody is me. You have just lost a customer". They probably thought that I meant we were walking out on this particular meal but I meant that we would not be back to the unit ever -- not as long as they are employed there. (These were weekend staff and we rarely eat there on weekends. I knew them but they didn't know me.)

 

So we went to a nearby working man's cafe that I had been meaning to try and had a much better breakfast at a noticeably lower price.

 

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Mind you, I'm not a complainer and I'm not a cheapskate. I always tip 20% regardless of the quality of the service because waitstaff depend on it -- it's an essential part of their income. I wouldn't want my daily pay to depend on what some customer thought of how I happended to feel that day, and I'm not going to do that to anybody else.

 

I've never complained about service before but in this case I sent an email to Denny's headquarters explaining both sides of what had happened, asking them to forward the information to the unit owners. In my email I made it clear that I would not return to the unit unless and until I had been assured that the two employees in question had been dismissed. I pointed out to them that while normal restaurant policy is to wait for a customer complaint, this particular case was a no-brainer, just as it would be a no brainer to ask a flasher to leave before a customer complained.

 

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I have just received a letter from Denny's national headquarters agreeing with my position and stating that they had forwarded the information to the appropriate parties on the very day that I had written in (which was a Sunday).

 

I don't know what the local franchisee is going to do. As with most franchise operations Corporate probably can't do much more than jawbone the owners. But I'm delighted to see that Corporate is not saying that the unit staff should have slavishly followed a reasonable policy to an unreasonable limit.

 

So ... Yay Denny's.

 

Regrettably for Corporate my wife and I really like the new cafe and we might not go back to the Denny's in question regardless of whether the offending employees are let go.

 

But we certainly will not hesitate to patronize other Denny's units.

Edited by xxmikexx

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xxmikexx

P.S. While I praise Denny's corporate, I can't praise the local franchisee. I never heard a word from them. What the local franchisee doesn't understand is that people talk, just as I'm doing now and just as I will whenever the opportunity arises for me to express my opinion about the unit in question.

 

But that's fine, we've switched our business to the cafe I was talking about, the Westwood Inn, a family restaurant that serves delicious fresh-cooked meals at prices lower than Denny's, many of whose entrees are flash-frozen meals that get microwaved in the kitchen.

 

By the way, I was eating at that Denny's the morning that a new manager walked in, announced that the franchise had just changed hands, that he was in charge, but that nobody was going to be let go.

 

That was a lie, in my opinion. What he should have said was what in my opinion was the truth: "I don't want you all leaving the restaurant unstaffed on short notice so I'll tell you that your jobs are safe. However, I don't mean this. What I really mean is that I want you to continue to work while I decide whether to keep you on or kick your ungrateful butt out the door. If the latter, I want you to continue to work until your replacement has been interviewed, hired and has walked into the restaurant."

 

I would say that there was 50% turnover in the morning shift between that day and the day a month or so later of the screaming kid incident. One of the departed waitresses now works at the Westwood Inn. She doesn't remember me because my wife and I didn't usually sit in her section. But I remember her, and she's giving the same great customer service at the Westwood Inn that she did at Denny's.

 

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Anyway, those of you who live in the Denver area, if you ever find yourself out in Lakewood, be sure to stop at the Westwood Inn, southwest corner of 6th and Wadsworth, exactly where the eastbound off-ramp exits onto Wadsworth.

 

Tell 'em Mike sent you.

Edited by xxmikexx
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