This week, I went to the City to meet a friend.
I arrived fairly earlier than the appointed time. That’s something I still don’t like as much about traveling by National Rail, where you can reach a venue and be as much as half an hour early, unless you want to be almost half an hour late. Not like the Tube, where you can get the next one every few minutes.
So I went to the coffee shop and decided to wait there. As soon as I entered, the staff politely informed me that they weren’t doing any coffee and could only serve food. I asked again if that’s what they meant. A coffee shop that couldn’t do coffee. Yes, that really was the case.
Well, I was already there and I’m quite neutral when it comes to choosing between coffee and tea. So maybe if the coffee machine wasn’t working, surely they could serve me some tea? It turned out they didn’t have boiling water either.
We went elsewhere eventually. We wouldn’t have been the only ones whose business that coffee shop would have lost.
If only they had a £10 kettle from the corner shop, they would have been able to serve me tea and I would have stayed. Probably ordered something to eat too. And I would have been happy to pay full price. Or if they were smart, they could have offered a small discount, and I would have been happier.
I suppose responding to such a situation comes down to how empowered a business’ process and workers are.
If the business felt that only what comes out of their big fancy coffee machines is good enough, and they’d rather lose customers if it didn’t work, then there’s no argument to be made.
If that isn’t the case, then it comes down to how empowered the employees are to be able to take a call about not losing customers, and buying a kettle to keep serving instead. Which comes down to culture and the level of ownership which any business’ workers feel they have.
There isn’t anything much to be done for the former case, but a lot can be done and said for developing the latter case. Except that because it is so difficult to build a culture of ownership and decentralised decision making in small businesses, such circumstances end up with the same result – no business.