Calling out really crap service from small businesses, albeit for a good reason.
Today I’m going to call out really crap service from small businesses, albeit for a good reason.
What’s the point of shopping, eating or drinking with a small local company rather than a big chain business?
Well, as I’ve written before, there are many reasons; some profound, some less so, all important. One of them is to enjoy human connection that is deep, meaningful and life-enhancing.
Let’s ponder dinner in a restaurant. There are three things that matter here, being food, ambience and service. Of these, I think that service is the most important.
Look at it this way.
If you go to a Michelin Star restaurant in a beautifully designed room and are treated with disdain by the person that greets you, or the waiter keeps forgetting things or you are made to wait by the coats for half an hour as they try to free up your table, then fantastic food and decoration are not going to save the evening. On the other hand, if you are greeted warmly and with kindness, efficiency and empathy, but the food is average and the room spartan, then that is fine.
That’s my view anyway.
I was so pleased to see Giles Coren calling out bad behaviour last weekend. He went to a restaurant called Gold in Notting Hill. I have been there twice and it’s been good, but Coren was with two young boys en route to a football match (hence with scarves or footie shirts) and was treated with absolute contempt by the greeter.
I think one can reasonably assume that this was because of the children/football kit. But it is unacceptable, inhospitable and flies in the face of why we support small local businesses (Gold is part of a small, high end, independent chain). Coren wanted to leave but his friend was paying, so they stayed. No food or decoration was going to save this dinner.
I have recently had similar experiences in a newish and small Daunt Books in Notting Hill. This used to be a wonderful independent bookshop and now whenever I go there (more fool me, I know, I know) the service is contemptuous. Last time I went the two people ‘running’ the shop chatted over me all the way through my transaction, and when I tried to make polite conversation, looked at me as if I was either stupid or invisible. Caroline has had similar experiences.
As you may know, I am a voracious reader. I bought around 200 books from Daunt in Marylebone last year. That’s probably around £4000 worth of books that I could have bought for £3000 on Amazon, but I chose not to. I like it there and I like the staff. I believe in independent booksellers because the experience enhances the product; the provenance and soul are good and the actual, physical book feels good to me. Genuinely, it feels better than if I had bought it from Amazon.
But if I believe in Daunt, if I commit to them, they have to believe in me, to commit to the customer. Human interaction is what drives me to trade with independents, and when this is missing the whole relationship falls apart.
This human interaction is harder for us to achieve with an online business, but if you buy from us (which you can do here) you will be delighted by how we bring genuine warmth and human interaction to the transaction. And now we even have a fantastic Open Studio in Scotland where you can interact with real product and people and in so doing, take away something that means more than the sum of its parts. You can make an appointment to visit Gladstone’s Luxury Dry Goods here.
Also, would you consider preordering my next book? It’s called Real Wild Heaven. 22 000 Years of Glen Dye, and it is part historical fiction, part geography lesson, part opinion piece on the concept of land ownership, and part meditation on the brevity of life. I think you will enjoy it whether you have been to Glen Dye or not. It’s here.
