Well said.
Harvard Business School professor apologizes to Chinese restaurant for being "very much out of line"
You can have all the degrees you want, and I agree the restaurant wasnât blameless, but thereâs this little thing called people skills that can really come in handy from time to timeâŚ
TL;DR: âIâm so sorry I got caught.â
Thatâs the thing: it doesnât work like that.
Since the restaurant in question belongs to Ran Duanâs parents, it is a reasonable assumption that the Sichuan Garden predates the Internet.
But in todayâs world every small business is pressured to have a website.
These people are in the restaurant business, they know how to run a restaurant, not a website. So they pay somebody to do the website for them. And life goes on.
Rising costs prompt rising prices on the menu, so they pay the not inconsiderable cost of having menus reprinted-- and not just the fancy in house menus, but the paper ones that customers can take home to order takeout. But changing the price list on the Internet requires another cash outlay, so they donât do it right away. Maybe they do it 6 months later, or maybe they do it 6 months after the 3rd price rise. These things all cost money. They arenât online because they want to be, but because in todayâs world they have to be. It is an extra cost.
In a perfect world whoever did the website would have made it easy for the small business to update the webpage themselves. But this isnât a perfect world. The website is most likely built with proprietary software thatâs been locked down with DRM, precisely so that the only way to update it would be to pay more to have the developer make the updates. (Chances are very good that the proprietary software would prevent them from hiring someone else to keep it current, or even enlist their granddaughter to update it as an after-school job. To do it themselves would very likely require them to start over, which may further trigger a domain name legal wrangle.
I have been in big chain stores where something has one price on the sale table and another on the regular shelf. Sometimes the cash register is programmed to assign them both the correct price, and sometimes not. This is not a swindle either, it is business running into technology walls.
When Ben Edelman called in the order, I assume he was told how much it would cost him on the phone. Thatâs how it works up here in Canada: they tell you how much the entire order will cost. Didnât he do the math? If he had, he could have brought it up before making payment.
Youâre characterizing this as a âswindleâ but that is not very likely. The restaurant business is a tough one, very often with low margins, which is why there is an incredibly high turnover. No restaurant will survive if it swindles customers. A fly-by-night restaurant might, but no established restaurant would risk its reputation, because $4 isnât worth the hit to its reputation.
Small businesses try to keep their costs down in order to compete. I wouldnât be surprised to learn that $4 price increase was to pay whoever did the website.
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And in a lot of places the law agrees with you. Others find that enough businesses take advantage of this that they have to make a law against it.
Some states have fairly significant penalties (in MI, up to a 250 dollar fine) and in some, like in MA, theyâre apparently fairly light. In NY, where I am, thereâs no immediate cost, but a couple of complaints to county Weights and Measures will usually trigger an inspection, and if more than 2 prices are out of whack on a 10 item sample, theyâre going to be walking your shop and fining you $1500 per overcharge they find.
Those places have clearly said that itâs important that you tell consumers accurate prices in everything you offer. If you want to do business there, either find a way to keep your advertised prices up to date or donât advertise them.
None of this excuses the bullying tone he took, but given the unconcerned tone of their initial response, and the restaurantâs apparent local reputation for overcharging, double-charging, and failing to deliver items, Iâm not convinced that a simple âhey, you know this is illegal, you really need to stop pulling this shitâ would have resulted in the âoutdatedâ prices being fixed for everyone else.
Edelman is a long-time consumer advocate, and apparently an effective one. Such people are often considered fairly obnoxious, especially by the businesses whose behavior they correct. Ask a GM employee about Ralph Nader even now.
Edelman got his start as a teen suing companies under the junk fax law. I remember very well the wailing and gnashing of teeth from companies that had made their living off of that form of spamvertising, and how they characterized everyone who sued them under that law as scamming opportunists trying to âhunt the small businessman to extinction.â Junk faxes were killed off long before the fax died, and legitimate small businesses lived on.
Personally, I hope he continues to insist that businesses, large and small, clean up their act and follow the law. I hope the lesson he and others take from this isnât to back away from flogging businesses that break the law, but to do so in such a way that itâs very clear that their concern is for all the patrons, not just their personal compensation. Unfortunately, I suspect that means their actions will either be ineffective, or much more threatening to the lawbreaking businesses: if instead of complaining obnoxiously but effectively, Edelman had searched for an attorney and a bunch of other patrons to start a class action, the restaurant would be in a lot more trouble, but nobody would be able to accuse him of doing it for his own benefit
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No. Itâs 2014. Phoned takeout orders from customers looking at a restaurantâs website are a core part of this business model, not a tertiary technology component to be ignored.
Either list the prices correctly, donât list them at all, or go out of your way to explain that your website prices are slightly out of date whenever you receive a phone order (which is probably dozens of times a day or more, which is my point exactlyâŚ)
It seems like this also could be avoided by some legalese on the menu pages âThese prices current as of May, 2011 and are subject to change.â
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[quote=âRed, post:26, topic:47989â]if instead of complaining obnoxiously but effectively, Edelman had searched for an attorney and a bunch of other patrons to start a class action, the restaurant would be in a lot more trouble,
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If instead of complaining obnoxiously but effectively, Elderman had searched for their address, walked in, pointed out they had somewhat of a problematic legal issue-waiting-to-happen in regards to their website pricing, and offered his assistance pro bono singlehandedly resolving the entire issue for every future customer and allowing a local business to thrive in a much more legally knowledgeable and customer pleasing way, no one would think he was such a jerk.
I canât quite see how simply having bad restaurants made worse - either shut, or worn down with legal fights - is helping anyone. Turn an average restaurant in to a great one, however, and you win the internets. And maybe free takeaway.
Also, hitmen never sit around chatting about how, when and where theyâre gonna shoot you. They just shoot you. Thatâd be another reason those âiâm gonna sue you like this, then and thereâ emails didnt exactly go down so believably well.
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Although Iâm sympathetic to laurelrusswurmâs comment on how many small restaurants donât know about how to keep up their websites Iâm also not ready to dismiss Edelmanâs point. This restaurant was systematically charging customers more than the posted prices on their website. For me thatâs definitely not kosher. Whether it was intentional or just a âconvenientâ oversight the fact remains the restaurant was in the wrong here.
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