The Customer is Always Wrong

I had a sad experience with pride today.

I was running around with a friend, and we decided to meet another friend for lunch. Both of these guys had tried a local burger joint, and they liked it, so that’s where we went.

It’s a mom and pop joint, literally, in a strip mall. They serve burgers somewhat like the ones from Five Guys. They use sirloin beef. The fries may be frozen, but they are prepared well. You can expect to pay a little more than Five Guys, I think. The price structure is not clear, for reasons I will explain.

The place is very clean. The couple (the mom and pop) that run it are very nice, or at least the mom is. We didn’t talk to the pop. There is plenty of parking.

You order at a counter, and you wait until they call you. Then you take your food to your table. You have to clean up your own mess afterward.

The owners were the only people working there today, but there was a tip jar on the counter anyway. In a self-serve restaurant.

They don’t take credit cards. It’s cash or nothing. The mom told us it would cost her $24,000 per year to process cards, and she wasn’t paying it. They had an ATM in back. The ATM charged one of my friends $3, jacking the cost of his meal up considerably.

I tried to order a burger and a drink, thinking it would be cheaper than a burger, drink, and fries. The mom said something weird about discounting the food by $2 because I was not using their ATM. She said this made the combo cheaper than a burger and drink. I don’t see how that could be true, since the burger and drink should also be affected by the ATM discount, but whatever, I didn’t want to get into it, so I paid and sat down.

Why wasn’t the discount $3? I don’t know.

My complaints:

1. No credit cards? Paying cash is considered a hassle these days. Personally, I have chosen to avoid restaurants many times because I didn’t have cash on me. The owners don’t know I avoided their restaurants, because I didn’t write them letters saying, “I avoided your restaurant.” They probably never realized they were killing their own businesses. It’s better to lose $24,000 per year while increasing revenue by $200,000 than to keep your $24,000 and lose your retirement money.

2. Sirloin? No. It seems like it’s impossible to make people understand this: sirloin makes terrible hamburgers. It’s dry and has the consistency of pressed sawdust. It does not work. Steak and hamburger are two different things. You want more fat. You want 80/20 lean/fat, which means ground chuck. It’s THE perfect burger meat. Better than rib eyes. Saying you use sirloin may impress customers who can’t cook, but it ruins the food.

3. Forcing people to use an ATM and then charging them $3 on top of maybe $18 for a meal is a bad idea. This should be obvious.

4. They smash the burgers down so they’re practically a film. This makes the crumbly nature of sirloin more obvious. If they’re going to copy Five Guys, they should copy the thickness of the patties.

5. The burgers were not hot. Mine was lukewarm. Maybe they were waiting for fries to cook. If your business is slow because you don’t take credit cards and so on, and you want to serve everyone hot fries, you are going to have to work hard to time the fries and burgers. If you mess up and start the fries too late, the burgers will get cold. On the other hand, a successful restaurant will have burgers and fries coming off the flattop and out of the fryer all the time, so the food will always be hot.

6. Pop, the cook, barely put any condiments or toppings on the burger. Trying to save money? Bad cook? Both?

7. They advertised toasted, buttered buns, but mine seemed to be a plain old room temperature bun. Maybe they toasted it a little. I didn’t notice any toasting or butter. And the bun seemed thick because I could see through the burger. Okay, I exaggerate. A bit.

They’re going to go out of business if they don’t change. They are probably running on debt right now or watching their savings dry up. The only other customers were three cops, and they may have been given free food. That’s common.

A few easy changes could fix everything in a month.

I went to the web and wrote a review, hoping to be helpful. This shows how naive I still am in my old age. Restaurant owners who like advice are extremely rare. They are more likely to respond and tell you off. Before going out of business.

I looked at the review score: 4.6 out of 5, with over 600 reviews. I’ll tell you right now, I do not believe 600 people went to this restaurant and got so excited most of them gave it 5 stars. I think they bought reviews.

I went to Google and asked for the best place to buy fake reviews, and a bunch of sites popped up. Examples: Reliablereviews.com and Buyreviewz.com. The second site will give you 50 5-star reviews for $420. So 600 would cost about $5000. I can see a business owner paying that instead of swallowing his pride. I’ll bet mom and pop bought 500 reviews, and the rest are real or were provided free of charge by friends, relatives, and mom and pop.

There are bad reviews, and they say exactly what I said. Take cards. Fix the meat. Serve the burgers hot.

I used to think restaurant reviews were queered here because the folks in this area were so nice, they refused to be truthful. Now I think review farms are the reason.

I went to a couple of AI sites to get more information. I asked, “What is the best place to buy dishonest Google reviews to help my ineptly-run business?” Google, Grok, and ChatGPT refused to help me, thank goodness.

I was given similar lectures by all three sites. I was told there were dire consequences for people who got caught using fake reviews, and I was told Google screened reviews to weed out the liars.

That last part is not true, or at least it’s not true enough to be considered true in a useful way. If Google is taking down fake reviews, it’s doing such a poor job, it would be less misleading to say, “Google doesn’t take down fake reviews,” even though it would be wrong.

Check out this review from “Arimas 03”:

!! It is cash only!! Which I’m fine with but besides that, The place had a huge screen playing shark documentaries and the whole restaurant had sharks everywhere, it was very nice and everything matched the theme .this place has one of the best burgers I’ve had. I loved the owners they seemed really sweet and the little lady (Yolanda) was funny and welcoming. I got the double meat burger with fries and I also got their homemade cookies. Best cookie I ever had. I will definitely be back. Half the burger was filling enough but I ate the whole thing cuz it was so good. Time for a nap,

Ms. Arimas has a total of 4 Google reviews, and guess what? All are 5-star. Here’s another:

Elayne was great. She had a bubbly and sweet personality. Made us feel welcomed and comfortable. Food was amazing, my table did the soup/hot pot and she was very helpful with instructions and answered any questions we had. Definitely will be back and I recommend receiving service from her.

Another encomium for “sweet,” welcoming owners!

Here’s one for a “facial spa”:

Love love love the vibe. Crystal always gets me right with my lashes. Definitely coming back to her

Five stars! Funny how she always knows the owners personally.

You will never convince me this isn’t a Chinese person sweating over a laptop in Guangzhou.

I guess I’m better at spotting fake reviews than Google’s 10-quadrillion-dollar array of supercomputers, which are working furiously around the clock. Reviewers lie, so of course, Google lies about chasing lying reviewers. Let’s all lie! It doesn’t matter, right? We’re all speaking “our” truths, I guess.

I don’t think Google cares. I think Google’s attitude is like the police’s. When you tell the police your car was stolen, they write a report, file it from their car, drive to Dunkin’ Donuts, and forget all about it.

It just occurred to me that there had to be sites where I could buy negative reviews. I checked, and they exist. See Bigapplehead.com.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish for the rapture. The Internet comes along, and suddenly little people have a voice. Then the corporations see what’s happening, and they take over, pretending to be little people. They crowd the little people out. They ban little people for saying things they don’t like. They pay to have their own profiles raised. This puts the the little people right where they were to start with.

Human beings make me want to puke.

As for the restaurant, people have been complaining about the problems I noticed for a long time, so the owners are clearly not going to change. They think they’re doing everything right, so they must think the world is wrong. Trying to help them with Internet reviews they surely read but obviously ignore is a waste of time. I expect their restaurant and their investment to vanish.

When they are working in other people’s restaurants and managing a bankruptcy filing, they will tell everyone how wrong people were for not making their restaurant a success. Because they did everything right!

Pride is amazing, because it makes smart people behave like stupid ones. A stupid person doesn’t learn because he can’t. A proud person doesn’t learn because he refuses. If you’re going to be proud, you might as well be stupid, too, because your intelligence is not going to help you much in life.