Re:Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade In...
by ForrestN on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:27AM
(#17780696)
The key is in your last sentence—you're extrapolating outward from "once interacted," but I think if you actually spoke to people who work in these restaurants, you'd learn that, in fact, the situation is "constantly interacted," albeit maybe "asshole" isn't as accurate as "person who overestimated their own tolerance."
Re:Launch HN: The Buttermilk Company (YC S18) – Homemade In...
by learc83 on Friday August 17, 2018 @12:10PM
(#17783805)
If it was "constantly" happening, given the thousands of times I've eaten at restaurants that serve spicy foods over my lifetime, I should have seen this fairly regularly.
My theory is that servers are the same as retail employees--a small difference in behaviors between groups reinforces preconceived stereotypes, which causes them to overestimate the differences between groups.
Also, you're saying things like "in fact" based on what you think that other people think the frequency is.
Every job has folk wisdom and heuristics. I worked retail and then retail tech support for years. I've had to deal with plenty of employees who wouldn't listen to customer's preferences because that preference didnt match some heuristic they were using.
They had the same justifications--"They don't really want it, they'll just end up returning it."
Those employees who insited on treating all of their customers like children because of a few bad experiences were consistently poor performers.
Their heuristics were detrimental, but they kept using them because people are very vulnerable to confirmation bias. No mass hysteria required.
Listen to your customer. Give them advice, warn them if necessary, but don't treat them like a child because you once interacted with an asshole who looked a bit like them.