Karma is Real
simpleprogrammer.com
simpleprogrammer.com
Just be a good customer. You'll see, in time, that her attitude will soften, and things will be comfortable again.
It's hard to run a business, whether it's a startup or a breakfast spot. There are lots of stresses your customers will never see, and a lot of burdens. Especially financial burdens on non-venture-funded/bootstrapped businesses like the breakfast place. Maybe she snapped, maybe she overreacted. Maybe there's more to it than you realize. Maybe she gets annoyed with people who are too exacting about small financial things.
It doesn't matter. Just be a good customer to her. It's he best thing you can do.
If you were really concerned about your lifetime transactions, you'd take the blip and keep on running. You've already said that the eatery has 'high quality food and higher quality service', so it's clear that this behaviour is not the norm. So what you're saying here is that at the sign of the first mis-step, you're out the door? That means you see it as a series of single transactions.
You're right, you don't owe her anything. Or yourself. Just stay home with clenched fists and stay angry about it. Be sure to have some aspirin handy in case you have a heart attack.
Call me crazy, but just for fun, you could try a mental experiment: imagine for a moment that she is in fact a deeply wise and loving person, and she was at that time doing just the right thing to teach you perfect patience. Just saying, neither you nor me can prove it true or false. Just saying, you know, it's a way to look at it.
By the way, that's a gorgeous picture on your blog. Makes me want to go travel.
Your post bothers me. You're setting yourself up as the 'better man' and making it so you can mockingly dismiss anyone that disagrees with you.
Studies have shown that the most difficult customers are often the least profitable. It's pretty widely known.
Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/more-more-mo...
Entrepreneur magazine: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/173108
How often have you seen the owner of a well-managed business say "I'm done with this guy" after only one incident? I admire this woman. She not only provides a quality product with good customer service, she knows when to cut her losses.
Don't advertise something you don't plan on honoring, and you don't have 'difficult customers.'
You can say it's ironic that he is "applying a different standard" to the two actors in the story, but that's just point scoring, and reality is subtler. Society holds the two parties to this relationship to different standards. By going to a local restaurant 15 times and paying their higher prices, he has more than demonstrated good faith in such a relationship. He has stayed truer to this restaurant than 95% of customers to local restaurants. The owner, on the other hand, has the obligation of providing excellent customer service, which is what society expects of a local restaurant who charges high prices for their food (the breakdown of this expectation is parodied in the Soup Nazi character of Seinfeld). Given how awesome repeat customers are for local restaurant businesses, it should have been intuitively obvious to the owner that they should have let it slide, or at the most said something like, "well technically this one doesn't count towards the promotion but I'll give it to you anyway this time." The fact that this wasn't obvious to the owner when it's SO BLATANT to us indicates that it's this person's entire mode of thinking. This is supported by the bad Yelp reviews for service the author noted in this comment section.
Its hard to use metaphors and analogies here because you have to consider all of the implications and breaking points because you know someone is going to draw them out ab absurdum.
I think that most people understand that your role in the story was "generic customer" and that the story wasn't supposed to be about your actions at all. You were supposed to be the black box and the restaurant the introspected actor.
We troll the ones we love the most. It's a subtle form of compliment.
While every model is a simplification, and technically wrong. Some simplifications can be useful when they are right almost every time. But this is not the case here. This is too much of an oversimplification, he overgeneralized it. The only useful take away from here is "mind the long term consequences". Everything else needs to be decided case by case. "The costumer is always right" is an overgeneralization. It's not always right, it depends. It's not even almost always right. You'll need to be critical case by case more often then not. It's not useful to oversimplify this.
[EDIT: I did become a really good programmer in the process and learnt a lot from my team lead who was highly knowledgeable, so that was the only good to come out of it.]
I have had enough promotions and warrantys turn out to be more work than they are worth (usually some escape clause or fine print) that I tend to either let my wife deal with them (I know... let the flaming begin) or just avoid them all together.
If it was the owner of the cafe who did this, then that'd be really strange, because obviously the owner probably does (or at least should) have the "big picture" in his/her mind. But some lowly employee who checks people out at the cash register? Of course they dont see the big picture, its not their business to.
Good points though, although they are all kind of a no-brainer in my mind. This seemed a lot more like a chance to articulately vent frustration, than actually making any real points or major revelations.
Sorry your family got hassled like this.
I wouldn't be bringing this up if it weren't for the authors use of "karma." It seems like all parties incurred some karma here.
Every person I have heard use this word casually does not believe in any form of reincarnation.
And to go deeper, this is a selfish argument for ethics or hard work. "Do it because it is good for you" should be, "Do it well because this is the correct thing to do".
Remember the recent story of United losing the kid? No big picture there, either!
This is always a great indication that the author engages in reductionist simpletonia. There are many types of people in this world, all of which can be plotted along a spectrum between two poles.
If he had really said what you mis-quoted, you might have some point.
You probably shouldn't drop the "all of which can be plotted along a spectrum between two poles" line right after complaining about reductionism. It's a common reductionist notion that fails for even the most simple of cases, politics.
Here's a particularly illuminating article on karma. I hope you decide to have a look and read with some interest: http://www.members.tripod.com/tathagata2000/enlightenment_wh...