I visited the Littleton, CO location this evening and had a wonderful meal with my wife. The food and service were both excellent. JR was our waiter in case he gets any extra kudos for this note and his excellent service.
That being said I must say how disappointed I am in the Melting Pot. I have been a patron of this location for 12 years. I don’t typically sign up for email offers or anything else but I have done so numerous times in addition to tonight. I noticed that the email offers come with discounts for birthday and anniversary celebrations. I was born in the month of May so I asked our server, JR, since I have not been receiving any offers if there was anything they could do for our bill this evening (I even showed JR my driver’s license to prove this was the month of my birth). JR went and asked the manager on duty tonight (05/28/2010) and came back with a very pathetic line given to him by the manager. The manager’s response was, “There is nothing they will do for us tonight and this is a corporate issue and I should take it up with them”.
Here is how this manager has offended a long time customer:
1) He could not have the spine to spend 20 seconds and visit the customer just to say “no” to the request.
2) He demonstrated a down right lack of responsibility by pushing off the request and blaming an entity not able to defend itself in that situation
3) He could have diffused the request by offering a simple 5% discount off the bill or something completely under his control.
On our way out the host asked how our visit was, I gave the host a summary of my disappointment and the host was rude and continually interrupted me to defend the manager’s position. Pathetic! The customer should at least be made to feel they are right in a situation like this. Instead this manager and host have made me feel like a complete outcast, not worthy of their time, attention or respect!
I have worked in the restaurant industry before and I would fire any staff member on the spot for any such transgression. You never ever make a customer feel like that!
I will not be visiting a Melting Pot restaurant ever again because of this. You have lost a loyal customer. In the future I suggest providing your managers and hosts with mandatory courses on how to work and communicate with both employees and guests of your establishment.
I have read many reviews online and the majority I see say good things about food, ambiance or wait staff. They also say many bad things about management or customer service. In this economic climate a business can not afford such customer-intolerance. I look forward to their eventual going out of business announcement.
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Our family consists of my wife, 3 step children, 1 child which does not live with me and myself. I have a good job and I make a decent living. My wife also works but her gross income is about 1/3rd of mine. I pay child support to my ex-wife who is pushing to have my support payments more than doubled to almost $1000 a month. I claimed a few with holdings on my taxes last year but I worried it was not enough. My wife and I set our with holdings to 0 about mid-way through the year in an effort to avoid owing taxes in 2009. Apparently that was still not enough.
I recently pulled up the turbo tax website as I do every year and put in estimations of income based off of our final paychecks for 2008 since as of the time of this writing we do not yet have our w-2 statements. According to turbo tax we owe over $8000 on top of the $20600 we have already paid in income taxes for 2008. Wow! I would say we were surprised but this is a drastic understatement. We are devastated both morally and financially. How are we going to raise that kind of cash when our budget is already razor thin?
We do not live a life of excess. We eat out once in a while out of necessity. We shop around always trying to find the best deals on groceries and other things we buy. We have some credit cards with a total balance of less than $1950 and always pay more than the minimum each month. We make too much to declare bankruptcy yet we do not make enough to pay huge bills like this in a timely manner when they surprise or blindside us. We have no savings to speak of and I constantly worry about retirement and not having enough to even pay for basic costs of living. When we retire social security will probably be non-existent according to the common opinion of pretty much everyone I talk to. So why do we pay such high taxes on income? Why do we lose 30% of the money we work hard to earn?
As I sit here late tonight writing this I have no answers, only questions. Why must the government make it so hard for me to continue working by stealing around $30 for every $100 I earn? How can we expect people to continue working when our government is fiscally devaluing the very work we do? The taxes I have already paid in 2008 average out to almost 1700 a month. This is more than the rent on our apartment or the combined vehicle payments we make each month for our 2 cars which we need in order to get to work on a regular basis. This is more than most people could stomach paying to any one debt yet I am forced to pay these taxes according to law. If I do not fork over a huge chunk of my income each month than I will be found and will be dragged off to jail or worse.
This fact scares me and it is why I pay my taxes. The mob used to make shop keepers pay for ‘protection’ and this situation feels an awful lot like that. So here I sit typing a few paragraphs that could either earn me public scrutiny or praise. I’d prefer neither, I simply want my money back.
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Why is it that companies tend to go with vendors whose products cost much more than other less-known vendors whose products perform much better in general (stability/performance for the $/functionality/security) when all aspects are considered?
Example:
Company XYZ, inc. chooses to use products from Vendor C instead of Vendor B. The company in question already uses a lot of Vendor C’s products and Vendor C is a ‘preferred’ vendor. Vendor B is an up and comer with several solutions that out-perform all aspects of Vendor C’s identical offerings. Both Vendors are presented to the company and Vendor C is still chosen even though Vendor B is more cost-effective, their solution has triple the performance of Vendor C’s product and Vendor C’s product’s are well known to constantly need software upgrades to fix security issues that the Vendor (through shoddy coding review) allows into ‘final’ releases.
Why did Vendor C get tapped for supplying the companies needs?
The answer is multi-faceted.
Kickbacks to corporate officials or board members of the company, board members with undisclosed conflicts of interest, managers not wanting to ‘rock the boat’ with new technology decisions, a lack of truly solid technical understanding combined with almost non-existent forward thinking (ie: a solution for the now in the now even if it doesn’t meet needs in 2 years).
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