This article will cover why it is that some people stop going to their favorite restaurant. Even though there can be many reasons, there is really just a few reasons why people really stop going to their favorite restaurant. Of course, there are some circumstances that involve a person moving to a new locations, which means that they would no longer be able to go to their local favorite restaurant. Usually this isn’t the reason why, as that person will just end up going to that same restaurants in their new location (which does happen pretty often).
The real reasons for most people, have to do with things that the restaraunt repeatedly kept doing that annoys that person enough that they stop going to the restaurant and start occasionally going to another. Other reasons involve things that they see done in the restaraunt that they might find a bit unsettling. This information has been gathered through years of customer complaints of what they have had to say about it from various different restaraunts. We will give those reasons here in this article.
Reason #1: The restaraunt keeps messing up their order.
This is one of the most common reasons why people stop going to a specific restaurant. The restaurant never gets their order right no matter what they order on the menu. To the guests, this feels like a lack of care or appreciation that the guests came to their restaurant, when they could have simply gone elsewhere when this happens repeatedly. Some restaurant do unfortunately take advantage of this lack of care that they show to their guests with these issues when they feel like there is no way that they can lose their business.
In one case, a restaurant that I ordered from had intentional given me less than what I had ordered, because I had ordered quite a bit of it at a time. However, they had me still pay the same usual amount. After returning to the restaurant after I saw this and told them, they gave me a small fraction of what I should have gotten, and still didn’t give me my full order. I left the restaurant and stopped going to it after I was cheated. If they didn’t have enough food to give me what I payed for, then it would have been better for them to just tell me that then to try and cheat me.
However, other restaurants that I have worked in do sincerely care about getting their guests’ orders made correctly, even though they do mess up sometimes.
In another situation, there was an owner of a franchise restaurant which did receive high ratings for this type of care for their customers. The owner understood how to keep the guests coming back to the restaurant by making sure that their orders were correct. However, this same owner became too sympathetic towards the many employees working at the restaraunt after awhile.
These same employees were what you would definitely say should have been people that should have been fired on the spot on more than one occasion. They were told how to do a simple job, yet they had zero care for their guests, and expressed it in many ways. The food they gave out was trash and often were messed up and not what the customers ordered. These customers were coming to a restaurant to pay them more for better quality food than what the restaurant’s cheaper competitors had, and the employees didn’t care.
The employees were purposely making bad quality food, and it had nothing to do with the job being hard. They were barely putting important ingredients on the food that made it as good as it was, like sauces for example, and were just plain throwing the food in containers upside down. After being professional corrected in a kind manner, they would literally throw a tantrum like a child and cuss at their managers. This wasn’t the first set of employees to ever work for the restaurant either.
Eventually the regulars at the restaraunt stopped coming. They had written customer complaints about their food orders being messed up so many times that they stopped coming. The crew members (and even some of the managers) had gotten their priorities mixed up, and were putting these bad employees (done of them literally evil and threatening and throwing stuff) that deserved to be fired over their customers.
In one circumstance this restaurant had lost its system so much to carelessness that they had given a completely obvious non-vegetarian dish to a person that ordered vegeterian food. It was a sandwich filled with meat instead of veggies that was given to the guest’s daughter. That customer was a regular that knew how good the restaraunt used to be, and now would never return again after that happened. Their order wasn’t going to be messed up for the fourth time, because they had stopped going to the restaurant.
Reason #2: The restaurant was disgusting.
The hygiene that the employees use when handling food is one of the main reasons why people stop going to specific restaurants. There are numerous customers complaining about various specific restaurants that they have visited, and left to never return, where these things have happened. The customers have spotted individuals handling their food without gloves, touching their hair and face and then touching their food, and picking out of the food containers where they will get the customer’s food and serve them, and eating it with their bare hands.
Besides this, customers may find cockroaches in the restaurant, which may be an indication of poor cleaning behind the counter. It could also be seen as a sign of other disgusting habits that the restaurant may have when dealing with the guests’ food behind the counter in the kitchen. From there, the customers leave and never return. Some of them file complaints about it, while others just tell their friends about what they saw and stop going to the restaurant.
Other things that are disgusting that might make a person stop going to a restaurant permanently, is outdated food being served to them. This could be molded food or old funny tasting sauces that could present health hazards to the person eating the food.
Reason #3 Poor customer service.
From our experience, hospitality does help a restaurant keep their guests, but people aren’t fooled by it enough that they don’t recognize when they aren’t being treated with respect or getting their money’s worth. There have been many times when a restaurant employee would act friendly by using their tone of voice and a friendly face, but still come off as rude to the guests. This is because the person serving them was actually hateful in other ways.
Of course, there is the flat out blatantly disrespectful individuals working at restaurants that make people stop going to them, but there are also the passive-aggressive individuals that have the same effect. Sometimes the employees at a restaurant like to show their passive-aggressive attitudes towards their guests, which lead the guests feeling unwelcomed, and stop going to the establishment. The worst is when these attitudes are carried from the managers all the way down to the crew members.
Half the time or more, these bad attitudes that these employees in restaurants display towards their customers are born from crazy assumptions where they assume that the guest they are serving is being rude. In one case an employee had a bad habit of yelling at her guests after they said “hello?” to her to see if anyone was there on the intercom after they thought that no one was available.
Unfortunately the crew members in a restaurant acting this way, often will keep doing these things unless they are suspended from work without pay for a few days, or inevitable fired. Giving them a personal talk only stops them from doing it in the presence of management, or they switch to an obvious passive-aggressive behavior that makes the guests not want to come back.
We have seen many restaurants however that have pleased their guests, without having to show an overdone display of hospitality, but rather a genuine care and appreciation for their guests that order their food. Some of the guests were even pleased enough to leave good reports about the restaurant. It is the helpfulness that the guests appreciate, not the over enthusiastic tone and the excessive smiling.
