Let me set the stage for you - around us, there was complete CHAOS going on - inebriated undergraduate students everywhere you looked. There was one exception - a table of middle-aged adults dining across from us.
When our meals arrived, the waiter successfully delivered 5 out of the 6 orders. Oddly enough, the waiter failed to bring the entree he suggested; instead, he brought a reuben sandwich with french fries. Realizing his error, the waiter left with the meal to remedy the situation in the kitchen.
Five minutes later, a busboy returns with the same reuben plate, BUT with the actual reuben sandwich now missing - you could see the grease stain from where it was sitting - serving just french fries on half the pate. The busboy said he was delivering the french fries now and the steak sandwich was on its way. In response to the half consumed looking plate, my friend explained that he would prefer to wait until the full meal comes, so the busboy took the plate away. Two minutes thereafter, our waiter returns with the half grease/ half french fries plate and re-serves the "meal" ridiculing us for sending the plate back to the kitchen.
While the inebriated undergraduates may have been giving the waiter a hard time and we looked closer in age to the undergraduate customers than the middle-age customers, our waiter automatically grouped us with the wrong customers - the drunk undergraduate students. Therefore, I believe, the waiter deemed it okay to provide the service that he did. There was no way the waiter would have served the missing reuben plate to the table of middle-aged adults.
Towards the end of the meal, he was very apologetic because I think he finally realized how poorly he had handled the situation. But at that point - it was a little too late. There was nothing mutually beneficial about this dining experience - we quickly paid the check and left to find another restaurant/bar to spend our money.
It does, indeed, sound as if you were "categorized" -- a common processing heuristic (shortcut)-- as undergrads and then treated with the "script" the waiter apparently reserves for them. In other words, he engaged in stereotyping and your group suffered as a result!
ReplyDeleteMy undergrad students have told me that, regardless of how polite they are (and most are very polite!), they're sometimes treated with disdain by servers on- and off-campus. Some servers seem to resent the privileged backgrounds they assume all Wake students enjoy. Undergrad CBers, please weigh in! By the way, Carling, is it possible that the inebriated patrons were grad students in communications or some other field?!?! (CB-related words in " ")
It helps if you are a middle-aged looking graduate student!
DeleteAlthough I can't relate to the story exactly, it does bring up an interesting marketing point. After a target market is identified by a company or brand, generalizations and assumptions must surely be made about them as a group (their values, their backgrouds, their socieoeconomical backgrounds). However, how much generalization and "categorizing" of your customers is too much?
ReplyDeleteFor example (and perhaps an extreme one), if you own a concert venue located in an area where all the top hits are country music, do you only sign country bands to play at your venue or do you expand and bring in some rock bands that resonate with some people?
Smart companies already realize that these sub-categories need to be captured within the general target market? That's why the Nike ads placed in GQ magazine have a different feel than those placed in Women's Health. On the flip side, Nike must be careful to not change the tone of their advertisements so much that the feel of the campaign is distrubted. It is a careful balancing act.
In your Putters situation, the waiter failed to realize that not every customer could fall into the "inebriated undergraduate" category. You did not and neither did the middle-aged group. If Putters was a little smarter, perhaps next game they'll choose to separate their seating so as to differentiate customers.
In a repeated game, however, sometimes the total benefit of such grouping is still positive... even if you loose some along the way. The cost (in terms of attention and/or money) of picking up those that don't fit into the categories may be greater than it's worth. I give pitching lessons and have a "script" I use. Though there are plenty of kids that don't understand my script or require different attention, I don't have the bandwidth to remember 20 different lesson plans each week. Instead, I am able to recognized where in my script each student is and pick up their program accordingly (whether I remember their last lesson or not). Similarly, this waiter may do really well with inebriated college students and it may not be worth his effort to create a new script for more sophisticated clients.
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