Popeyes. Taco Bell. Best Buy. Wendy’s.
That’s the list of businesses that I’ve filed a formal complaint with for god-awful service in the last three years. Poor customer service is tolerated by management, but not by corporate. So I complain where it’ll do some good — to corporate. Since I’ve started doing this I’ve also filed several positive reports, in instances where I received outstanding service. I figure it’s only fair. Plus, since outstanding customer service is so rare, it’s not something I have to do often.
But now I can add Bennigan’s to the list above.
A group of coworkers and I went to Bennigans on Vets this Monday. I won’t tell you the story of that meal, but I will include the text of my complaint email to Bennigans for your viewing pleasure.
We came into the restaurant at about 11:15 or 11:20 am. There’s a group of us who work nearby, and we eat lunch at a different place nearly every day of the week. We have a regular rotation that, prior to this visit, included Bennigans. We typically go to lunch at the same time in order to beat the rush, and it works.
We were seated immediately, and we ordered our food about 5 minutes later. At this point, the restaurant was practically deserted (as you would anticipate, it not yet being even 11:30). Now, the last two trips we’d made to Bennigans had taken an extraordinarily long time, so we made sure to make it known that we only had an hour lunch break.
Still, 45 minutes had gone by and no sign of our food. We asked our waiter what the wait was, and he said that the kitchen had gotten busy. Whether or not that’s the case, the simple fact is that we placed our orders before the restaurant got crowded. And furthermore, should it really take 45 minutes to prepare 4 burgers and an order of nachos? I think not, especially after we specifically mentioned that we’re in a time crunch, here. We escalated our complaint to the manager, whose name I did not catch (she was a black woman, in her mid-30s, I’d guess). She apologized for the wait, but offered us no assurance that the slowness we’ve come to expect from this particular franchise was a problem she was attempting to correct.
52 minutes after we placed our order, our food came out. All four of the burgers had something wrong with them (bbq sauce on a burger that didn’t come with it, a plain burger with lettuce on it, another with bacon that was ordered without bacon, and one without bacon that came with bacon [those last two didn’t simply go to the wrong people, either, they were completely different burgers]). Not only that, but 3 of the 4 burgers were cold, as were the nachos. The manager began to apologize profusely and gave us 50% off of our bill.
This is not the first time we’ve had this problem with particular restaurant (although it’s the worst visit of the three bad ones), and they don’t seem to be making any effort to correct it. We like the food at Bennigans, and it’s conveniently located. But you can bet that none of us will be returning to this location anytime soon.
Criminally slow service, orders that were more wrong than right (and we didn’t have the time to wait for them to get fixed), and a staff with a cavalier attitude towards customer service. Bad news.
I would normally offer a better summary than I did in the final paragraph of this complaint, but their online for online allows you to input 2500 characters, and I was at 2499.
So long, Bennigan’s on Vets. We hardly knew ye.
