| rev:text
| - Reverse marketing at it's finest! This restaurant has fine-tuned a method of spending money to chase regular customers away.
Here's the scoop: I eat at Los Habaneros semi-regularly. It serves the kind of average Mexican food you can find every two or three blocks in a city, but being equidistant from my house as Don Tequila, I had always chosen Los Habaneros due to the slightly better atmosphere. Hence, I was pretty excited to see it offer a $10 gets you $20 Groupon.
Things started out OK. Two members in my party found the food to be average and acceptable, while one had to send an order back because the cheese in the middle of the dish was still cold and hard. Hitting .666 may be a great batting average, but it's not much to say for a restaurant. Still, we tend to accept these kinds of performances from this particular genre of food, don't we? It's not like we walk in with high expectations and I'm pretty forgiving. We'd had orders undercooked or misplaced at this restaurant before, and always been back.
But then we tried to pay.
Upon presenting my Groupon via the Groupon mobile app, the server first told me that I needed to have the paper version for it to be accepted. "Au contraire!" I countered, bringing a third language into the conversation, "the Groupon fine print says otherwise." I soon ended up in a conversation with the "Owner" of the restaurant, who told me that "Twenty dollars is too much" and offered me 20% off instead.
Being that this was a deal I had paid for and not just some coupon I found in the paper, I wasn't about to let the issue drop. When the "owner" told me that he had never heard of Groupon before, I proceeded to argue that it would be impossible that Groupon would just choose to create an offer at his restaurant without his consent and a signature on a five page contract. He then countered that "It's not fair, you pay $10 and I pay $15", subtracting the $5 Groupon commission and showing a stunning understanding of the Groupon business model for a guy who had never heard of the service. Hmmm.
Begrudgingly, the restaurant owner finally accepted my discount, but not before I showed him the offer was still live on Groupon's website. The only positive part of my experience was seeing the panicked look in his face when I told him 841... 842.... 843 discounts had been sold.
Instead of using this opportunity to continue to win new customers, they lied to me and tried to swindle me. A conversation with one of my neighbors afterwards confirmed for me that the owner had tried to pull the "I can't do $20 but I'll give you 20%" bait and switch before.
I won't be back and will go to Don Tequila from here on forward. Textbook job guys!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)