£2 for hot water and lemon
 

Is the customer always right? In a blow struck for restaurateurs and front-of-house staff everywhere, a manager at Bennett’s Cafe and Bistro in York recently left a robust reply to a complaint left by a customer on TripAdvisor. The review – which, for some inexplicable reason, has been taken down – was picked up on Twitter where it has divided opinion.

The customer, Hannah C, said she went out for “afternoon tea” on a “tight budget” and complained about being charged £2 for “hot water and a thin slice of lemon”. The restaurant was, she said, “over-priced” and home to “very rude staff”.

The review



The cafe response
I’m sorry that you feel that you were “ripped off” and I’ll try to explain why you weren’t. You entered the cafe and the waiter showed you to your seat, gave you a menu, waited for a time and then took your order. He entered it into the till, collected a cup, saucer and spoon and took them into the kitchen. There, he selected a knife, chopping board, got a lemon from the fridge, cut off a slice and put it in the cup. Then, he returned to the dining room, drew off the necessary hot water and carried the cup to your table. When you were leaving, he printed off your bill, took it to you, processed your credit card payment and cashed off the till. After you left, he cleared away your cup, saucer and spoon, took them into the kitchen, washed and dried them, along with the chopping board and knife and put away the lemon. Then, returning to the dining room, he restacked the cup, saucer and spoon, wiped down your table and replaced the menu, awaiting the next customer.

That’s at least 2-3 minutes work for the waiter.

The cost of overheads for the business, ie rent, business rates, electricity costs, bank charges, etc, works out at £27.50 per hour of trading. I pay my colleagues a decent living wage and after taking into account holiday pay, national insurance and non-productive time prior to opening and after closing, the waiter who served you costs me £12.50 per hour. Therefore, together the cost is £40 per hour or 67p per minute, meaning that the cost of providing you with 2-3 minutes of service was £1.34 – £2.00. Then the government add on VAT at 20% which takes the cost of that cup of fruit infusion to between £1.60 and £2.40 irrespective of whether you had a teabag costing one and a half pence or a slice of lemon costing five pence.

I have to pay my suppliers otherwise the facilities won’t be available to other people who use them in the future. I accept that it makes the price of a cuppa in a city centre cafe look expensive compared to the one you make at home but unfortunately that’s the cruel reality of life. It’s actually the facilities that cost the money, far more so than the ingredients. Perhaps, the rudeness that you perceived in me was triggered by the disrespect that I perceived in you by your presumption that you could use our facilities and be waited on for free.

With whom do you agree?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...emon?CMP=fb_gu

"That’s at least 2-3 minutes work for the waiter."


Yes I back there Manager

Completely agree with the cafe owner here, 2 quid seems cheap to sit in a warm cafe being served

With the amount of competition in York I would say that was a big mistake. People expect excellent customer service and to ruin that experience was mean and unnecessary.
Who's to say they wouldn't have gone in regularly if not for that incident and spent lot's more in the future? As it stands he's lost their business, those who overheard the exchange and many who agree with her.
I appreciate he is a business and I'm not suggesting there was not a small charge but £2 is excessive and the subsequent humiliation unwarranted.

At first I thought what a ridiculous price for hot water and lemon, but hats off to the manager for that response, can't really be argued with :laugh: And he has a very good point. If the lady just wanted hot water and lemon, there was nothing stopping her from buying a lemon from the supermarket, going home and boiling a kettle. But she wanted to use someone else's services, so why shouldn't they charge her for that :shrug:

The customer is NOT always right... and in this case the owner's explanation (you pay for the service, not the ingredients) of why it costs that amount is perfectly justified. My immediate thought before I even read it was "She wouldn't have had a problem paying £2 for tea, and tea is as cheap as if not cheaper than a lemon".

On the other hand, it does sound like the waiter was rude and dismissive at the time -- IF -- her account of what happened is accurate. Which it may not be - in my experience these "incidents" seem to somehow become worse and worse each time they're recounted by the customer...

Also, best practice for the owner would have been not to "rise" to the bad review. Keep it simple and professional. The irked customer is TRYING to annoy you... if you reply with a longwinded response like this (which is obviously passive-aggressive) you're just playing right into what they want from you. A clean, short, simple, cut'n'paste apology is essentially a way of saying "Yeah OK whatever :)" and getting away with it :hee:

If she was having other stuff, then i agree with the customer, lemon is usually free with a lemonade, and the hot water is already heated up and ready for hot drinks, so i do think it was a bit tight of the cafe not to oblige with a free drink, i know most places i've been offer it for free (as most people don't go to a cafe for hot water and lemon!), however the posher places have charged me for a hot water and lemon.

I forgot to add this to my original post, but now that I know someone is here who can actually answer it...

WHY would anyone even want to drink hot water with a bit of lemon in it in the first place? :shrug:

:laugh:

It's good for digestion, refreshing, and full of vitamin C (and also deliciously warming on a cold day!)

2 quid for a tea, two quid for boiling water and a slice of lemon, there is little cost difference in producing and serving both, if her budget was that tight she should have enquired as to the cost before ordering, I agree there was no need for rudeness then we don't know how rude the customer was to begin with, or the time of day or how many rude customers the waiter had dealt with already that day

Can't see anything wrong with the charge, the manager was quite clear in his reply as well.
Service charge is quite a high percentage of any meal once if is broken down, plus the overheads.
Perhaps she would have been better for buying a bottle of water and sitting on a bench if she wanted to go cheap:shrug:

Yeah but you could just eat the lemon... waste of a good lemon slice, pouring hot water all over it.

(Yeah... I genuinely do like eating lemon. I've always loved sour stuff and it escalated. I can eat one like an orange :( )

:laugh:

My daughter's the same, she loves lemon and eats it like an orange:shocked:

This isn't you is it Kizzy you tight bitch :laugh:

Exactly, especially soft drinks. A Starbucks coffee can be like £3 - yet if you have a coffee filter, you can buy a bag of coffee beans directly from Starbucks for £5 which easily makes 100+ coffees... so 5p a cup, maybe 15p at most if you include milk, sugar and electricity. Doesn't mean I begrudge paying for coffee when I'm out... you're paying for the time and the convenience of someone else making it for you.

Exactly TS, it's the pleasure and comfort of being waited on that you are paying for. Staff have to be paid.

If it was not accurate the response would have indicated this, it didn't.
Best practice would be to not try rip people off I say.
If she had been alone occupying a table then maybe that breakdown would be more justifiable, she wasn't.
Being a non drinker I find that when I go out I quite regularly ask for soda and cordial, the price I am charged varies from nothing to £1. Never experienced anything like that :/

Not seeing a huge difference between £1 and £2, especially when soda and cordial actually costs a bar basically nothing. It's literally worth about 2p.

Yorks tea room are overpriced as it's a tourist trap, we got off the train from London at 9.30 am and there was a queue of people about a mile long waiting to get into Betty's Tea rooms, the prices were eye watering and it was mostly women, it made me embarrassed to be a woman to see them queuing in the cold to be ripped off

It could well have been to be fair Cherie, I'm not tight either.

Really? it's double for a start.
I thought that when I heard this lady was being charged £2 for something that in a lot of establishments is free...To wash your hands in.

Tbf Kizzy you would be the first one to voice concern over low wages, how do you balance that out if people are complaining about 2.00 to be served, in a hospital you would be charged that for a cup of tepid coffee from a machine

It just means that other establishments are making their money on other items. Nothing is ever free even if it seems so :laugh:

The appeal of Bettys is the years of excellent products and customer service, I'd say this jumped up cafe could learn a thing or two from them.

2 quids about right to be fair to the cafe, I drink the same sometimes and it's always between 1 and 2 quid