Don't try to con your customers

 What the hell?!?!" 

In  my imagination though, when the waitress presented a TT $72.00 bill for a piece of bake and a portion of buljol,  I swear, I swear I uttered a stronger expletive. 

This happened at the hotel which I currently rent office space and what caused  my outrage was that the day before, at noon, I ordered the same meal and  it cost 1/3 of the price. At first I was confused.

"Ahem, something must be wrong here," I said, "yesterday I paid $25.00 for this very meal."

"That was for lunch ," the restaurant supervisor replied. "You're ordering breakfast now"

This was certainly the most horrible case of customer service and might I add,  product positioning I had seen. Nothing had changed in my order. The portions were the same. The box was the same. Heck, even the buljol looked identical to what I was served the day before.  But according to the calculations of someone sitting in the hotel's office, the bake and buljol should increase to three times as much because it was being served during the breakfast hours where it was magically rebranded, 'Trini Breakfast'.

Of course I refused to pay. And when I uttered the expletive  in my mind, I immediately started flipping the situation on its head. 

Hotel N is now changing a great portion of its stores into a series of   boutique-like offices.   That means more business people, more of their clients and more disposable income in and out of the building. A market waiting to be cultivated. Not milked.

The service breakthrough for the person sitting  in that office would have been to send out welcome letters to the new clientele  offering lunch and breakfast discounts from  the menus. In other words, get the captive audience to buy-in to  the hotel's two restaurants. Encourage them to bring their customers for even more discounts. That would create loyalists  who could later be leveraged to market the hotel. Imagine that! A ten percent discount on a meal creating a great cross selling opportunity. 

Here's the common sense lesson, I think: don't try to con your customers. Bake and buljol no matter what fancy name you give it, and no matter what hour you serve it, is still flour and saltfish. At least that's what one tenant told me as I found myself repeating the story a thousand times over.