Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Insta-Blog!



Well, most of my posts (for the one of you that actually ever even reads this poor excuse for a blog) recently have centered around getting images of a coffee cup hosted on the web so I can post the pictures on a chat board I contribute to frequented by other devotees of this band. But, dear reader (you know who you are), you are in luck, because I've managed to unearth a hidden gem from the archives which provides me with a ready-made blog. My apologies for formatting issues from pasting it into the blog.

Herewith, I present my letter of complaint sent to Denny's corporate a few years back after a particularly unsatisfactory breakfast. Enjoy.

I'm writing to you today to provide some feedback on my dining experience at the Denny's located at 2173 Northampton St. in Holyoke, Massachusetts. I'm assuming that the emails and letters you receive from satisfied customers get framed and placed on the walls at HQ down in South Carolina or at the very least get sent to some distribution list or another within the company.

This is not one of those emails.

I will begin by citing some of the content I found on your website which struck me as ironic. According to the site, Denny's strives to provide the following: 1. Great Food -- High quality, prepared to each customer's satisfaction. 2. Great Service -- Prompt, friendly, courteous and efficient. 3. Great People -- Considerate, helpful, respectful, willing to go the extra mile.
As I relate the details of our meal at Denny's, please keep those principles in mind.
We arrived at about 1pm on a Sunday and were seated promptly. Our waitress came over to take drink orders from the six of us while we looked over the menu. We ordered four cokes, two coffees, two OJ's, and waters all around. We got the waters and a (one) coke when the waitress came back to take our orders. Orders taken, we began to talk amongst ourselves while we waited for the remainder of the drinks to be delivered.

This was the last we would see of our waitress or any beverages for the next three quarters of an hour.

That's forty-five minutes.


We eventually had to send out an away-team to ascertain the whereabouts of our food. The team returned to report that the food had been located, and was sitting on the ledge outside the kitchen getting cold. Fifteen minutes later, the food began to arrive. Of the six ordersplaced, none were correct. Sandwiches with 'hold the onions' specified had lots of onions. Breakfast sides never arrived. Eggs were not prepared correctly. No one received coffee or cokes despite friendly reminders to our waitress. I say friendly, because we were still willing to give herthe benefit of the doubt. I have myself waited tables and know that it's not the easiest job in the world, so I consider myself to be more patient than the average customer: it took a lot to push me far enough to take time out of my day to write this letter.


Our waitress became openly hostile about the missing and incorrect items and, of course, never returned with coffee or soda or any of the other missing items. She was unapologetic about the lateness of the food or the fact that the orders were wrong across the board, and not even in the same neighborhood as warm. So, we were left to consume a breakfast that distantly resembled what we had ordered. Nobody enjoyed it, or felt that anyone involved in its preparation or delivery gave a tinker's cuss about the tenets of Great Food, Great Service or Great People.

When the bill finally arrived, it clearly showed that some of the items had never been sent to the kitchen in the first place. Some of those that HAD been ordered with modifications (e.g. no onions) were logged correctly on the bill, and therefore had been delivered with those caveats to the kitchen staff who had evidently taken great pleasure in disregarding the special orders or regarded them as 'if you feel like it'. To our waitresses' credit, she did manage to faithfully record each of our six requests for glasses of water as individual line items on the bill. In short, it was agreed by all that this was the worst meal anyone had ever had at a restaurant, period.

It wasn't just that the food was late, and nobody got what they ordered, it was that the impression was clearly conveyed that nobody working at Denny's cared. When we went to the register to pay the bill, I commented to the hostess that we were not happy with our dining experience and requested that she remove items on the bill which never made it to our table. She could have saved the day, by making some sort of apology, offering not to charge us for the meal, etc., but she didn't. She simply sighed, and said, "O.K." in a manner I can only describe as 'grudgingly' to our request to removei tems from the bill, and that's it.

That was the last straw, and as we left, I don't mind telling you, we proclaimed to all and sundry that we had just had the worst dining experience of our lives, and about a dozen people who had been waiting in the lobby for tables under the delusion they might get an enjoyable breakfast with a novel name, high-tailed it out of there.

I have come to expect that Denny's is not going to provide the same level of service I would get at say, an Applebee's. This time, though, our meal was an utter disaster. You need to seriously reassess how your franchisees are representing your brand because whatever quality control measures you currently have in place are a joke.

And your customers aren't laughing.

2 comments:

DJDiva said...

LOL I assume I may be the one reader??

WOW! I cannot believe a manager didn't step in to remedy that situation? how could this bozo just refuse to bring the drinks? Or even attempt to get the orders right? I think I would have refused to pay at all and walked out. I really hope you didn't tip her anything (or just left a penny)!

Did Denny's write back or acknowledge this disaster in any way?

Reynolds said...

They did. And someone from corporate called me, but nothing came of it past me getting to talk to someone from the head office and assurances that "they'd look into it".