So tonight we decided to join some friends for dinner at Denny’s.  Perhaps that was our first mistake.  This wouldn’t be our choice for a night out of fine dining but we thought it might be a bit of a novelty to celebrate our buddy’s 40th birthday with an “Eat for free on your birthday” meal at the local greasy spoon.  It was bound to be memorable and memorable it was.

We were late leaving the house because even though we had written our friend’s card on the weekend, it got misplaced in our den.  Hard to believe considering everything is so nicely organized into neat little piles and folders.  Excuse me while I cough.

Out the door we go and as we park the car I notice a sign that says “Kids eat free on Tuesday nights!”.  “Score” I say to my hubby and we do the happy dance in the parking lot.  OK, I did the happy dance, DH just went about his business of getting the kidlets out of their carseats.

The kids were all revved up when they got their menus and that they could order pancakes that looked like softballs (yes it’s true and what will they think of next?).  We we were just trying to contain them to the booth.  Darn, left the duct tape at home again.

Meanwhile our buddy had ordered a drink and was starvin like Marvin so we needed to get down to the business of figuring out what we wanted to eat.  The hostess comes to the table to order our drinks but was not capable of taking our food order so we had to wait another couple of minutes for our actual waitress.

Now I do not fault the waitress because she is simply implementing the restaurants POLICY and the POLICY is that you cannot have the “Free birthday dinner” promo as well as the “Kids eat free on Tuesday’s promo” because that was the rules when you are sitting at one table.  Not sure where it actually says “those are the rules” but this is what we are now being told.

Having just attended Roy Osing’s Be Different or be Dead chat about customer service and eliminating dumb rules, I may have been able to overlook this but it was hard to not think of the obvious way around this rule.  In case you haven’t figured it out for yourself (which I am sure you have), our friends could have been sitting at one table and got the buy one regular meal and get your “Free birthday dinner” promo and we could have sat at the table next to them and got the “Kids eat free” promo because each kid that is with a paying adult eats for free.  If only it wasn’t for that pesky POLICY.  Did I mention the word POLICY yet or how much I despise that word?

This is where the dumb part comes in.  If you are prepared to offer these promotions if we sat at separate tables, why could it not be offered if you sat together and what a terrible way to start out an evening by having the rules explained to you on how these otherwise simple promotions actually worked.  Bait.  Switch.

We were not in the mood to point out the obvious to someone who was merely regurgitating what she had been told to say, nor did we want to create a scene on our friend’s 40th birthday (although our kids were doing their best on this front already) so we just accepted it and figured we would look back and laugh at this one day.

So that was the main event for the night except for two other newsy items:

1.  Our friend had ordered a lemonade which had not arrived at our table by the time we had got there.  He did however have a glass that had water in it.  When he tried to explain to our waitress that he was still waiting for the lemonade he ordered, she was very confused because she thought the water he had was actually lemonade.  No biggy but by this point, my friend didn’t want the lemonade any more and ordered  decaf coffee instead.  The waitress removed his glass of water and our friend asked to make sure he wasn’t going to be charged for a lemonade.  A few minutes later the waitress returned to say that she had tried the liquid in the glass herself and that my friend was right, it wasn’t lemonade!  Basically she was accusing him of lying and tested his drink to make sure he wasn’t and then came back and told us about it!  Wow, that is in my top 10 customer service fiascos for shizzle!

2.  The other entertaining part of the ordeal (I mean meal) was when we sniffed something stinky.  DH jumps up and grabs our potty training 3 yo and whisks him off to the washroom, mainly because in our panic to leave the house we forgot to bring any reinforcements (ie. change of clothes, wipes etc.).  Thankfully the mad dash paid off and the little guy made it to the washroom in time.  We had another laugh when he ran up to the table afterward as fast as he could and yelled “I just did a big poop in the toilet”.  You probably need to know our son is the loudest kid on earth so the entire restaurant heard this.

If memory serves, I believe this was the 2nd time in the last 14 years I have eaten at Denny’s and let’s just say it will be at least another 14 years before I go back.  Make it 15 years and my buddy can enjoy something off the 55+ seniors menu, unless of course they change their POLICY on that too.

Denny’s #fail, next time we are splurging and paying for all of our meals but hey, thanks for the memories.
Yours in customer service,
Sue

Sue Sinclair
Chief Executive Mom, Raspberry Kids

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Tags: 40th birthday, customer service, denny's, denny's restaurant, eat free on your birthday, kids eat free, memorable

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Family Tales & Shenanigans, Manic Mompreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.