A Pennsylvania Restaurant Gets It ALL Wrong

So you're a restaurant owner or manager and a couple comes in for dinner. The service they receive from the waitress is so bad, they refuse to pay the mandatory tip. The couple is having dinner with friends, and they have to get their own refills, napkins and silverware while the waitress goes out for a cigarette break. 

As the manager, what do you do when the couple refuses to pay the mandatory 22% tip?

If you're a manager at the Lehigh Pub in Bethelehem, you have the couple arrested.

Read about it here.

Marshall Field, the successful retailer, once said, "the customer is always right."

Lehigh Pub's management apparently hasn't heard of that concept.

The PR backlash on this could be tremendous. If you're running a pub in a state that's already suffering from unemployment and a bad economy, imagine getting national publicity that your service is so bad, customers refuse to pay the tip. Then imagine getting national publicity that you have your customers arrested.

I heard a few people talking about this, and every one of them was outraged that there was a mandatory tip. "No wonder the waitress wasn't working hard," was the typical comment. A mandatory tip is a bad idea.

Successful businesses work hard to keep their customers happy. In this instance, the waitress should have been either fired or at least made to forfeit the tip. The manager should have apologized to the couple and given them and their friends coupons for free dinners to make up for their bad experience. Consider for a moment the good feelings that might have resulted and the negative publicity that could have been avoided. Consider the customers that will be lost because the image of Lehigh Pub has forever been damaged. The "brand" is now one of a waitress on a smoke break and the police slapping cuffs on customers. Not a place I want to go with my wife.

If I were the manager of a competitor, you can bet I would push a marketing campaign immediately promising "no mandatory tip" and "we promise not to arrest our customers."

Sometimes, you wonder what's wrong with people.