26 Feb 09

It’s been a funny sort of day.

Today, the official announcement from my last job that people have been expected for a while finally came through. Phase 2 of a major re-organisation of the company. As regular readers will now, I was made redundant during Phase 1 back in October. Today, another 159 roles were put at risk (though we know from the past that this is likely to be going ahead). The company will be stopping all its printing functions by April, outsourcing the printing of its publications to another company. Although this was sort of expected, it’s hard to see the company being hit hard like this. It used to be a great company to work for, but over the past 1-2 years, things have not been going well and the credit crunch has hit it hard. Clearly, things have not gotten better. It seems the sacrifices of the Phase 1 staff were in vain and more of my friends (including my former manager and close friend) are now looking at redundancy. I am offering to help them with anything I can, as I’ve already gone through this process and have had to deal with the consequences.

This evening, Heather and I went to a local restaurant close to where we live to have dinner with my mum and her partner. It was sort of a celebratory dinner in light of me getting a new job. They are doing a deal at the moment in which they are offering two meals for £10 including salad. I thought “Great. Four meals for £20 plus drinks. Bargain.” Certainly a good way to get punters in during the recession which like most places is hitting restaurants hard.

However, when the bill came, it came to over £40 when I was expecting a figure around the £26 mark. When questioned, the server said she had forgotten to put it through correctly on the till and went off to correct it. She came back shortly after to say that as drinks were ordered before the 7pm start time, we could only have the Early Deal of 25% off the bill. I argued this point as it doesn’t say anywhere that your bill would start before 7pm if you ordered drinks. My mum and her partner were going to have drinks in the bar first, but were automatically directed to the table. What else were they supposed to do? Sit there and wait until 7pm before ordering a drink. Certainly no food was ordered before 7pm, as Heather and I didn’t arrive much before that and had to send them away a couple of times as we hadn’t decided what we wanted.

We then discovered that apparently, we still couldn’t have the 2 for £10 deal, as two of the meals hadn’t come off their special menu. We weren’t even aware there WAS a special menu. It’s wasn’t listed on any of the signs as being off a special menu (see above), so we assuming it meant everything off their standard menu. Nor does it say that on any of their signs outside, nor did the staff make this clear at the time of ordering. I wasn’t going to pay £40 or even their suggested reduction to £35. By this time, I had had enough. I’ve been out of work and living off redundancy money and Jobseekers Allowance for the past four months and earlier today, 160 of my friends effectively lost their jobs and I was in no mood for fannying about. I launched into as big a tirade as I could manage with a sore throat and mentioned various trading standards violations and that I had friends at the KM who could use a good news story right now. I gave her one of my business cards and asked her to get the manager to call me in the morning. The acting manager sloped off for about 10 minutes. As we suspected, she was talking with the owner. She came back to the table with a face like thunder and the bill priced at £26. I hastily paid the bill and we left.

I’m expecting a call from the owner tomorrow morning. I’m not going to get angry about it. I just want them to be aware that certain omissions caused what should have been a pleasurable evening to become sullied. I want them to make some very small changes to prevent problems in the future. Restaurants need to get custom during the week and this two meals for £10 deal is a great idea, but if it’s not done correctly, customers are going to get annoyed and will start voting with their feet. This restaurant is a favourite of ours and I don’t want to see if suffer. This is for their own good.