Having done a stint in retail management, I do understand the often difficult trade-off between allocating scarce resources in your budget to be able to pay your staff to open/close outside of "public opening hours", and not doing so thereby risking the kind of experience grahame encountered.
We're in "retail" too I suppose - retailing hotel rooms, also happy to do cafe style service and have extreme hours to cope with, and I can sympathise with shoulder hours where you have staff preparing / cleaning up at the end of the day. What really got me was (i) that the ONLY sign I could see was this on the door in the ticket office was:
(ii) that the "other door" around the front of the station was wide open, no signs at all and
(iii) that the staff member took the attitude of "I've just got here - of course we're not open" and when I told her about the sign said "I wasn't on yesterday. That's because they were having trouble with the door".
Take down the "we are open" sign when you close for the night, folks ... don't snarl at a wannabe customer who follows such a sign if it's been left up by mistake, but rather apologise nicely and be seen to correct the problem, and you won't loose a regular customer ... nor get bad reviews posted. Had Steamers said "closed" on the door, even had there been staff inside, I would have just shrugged, thought "well it
is early on Saturday" and carried on past. With no
fail reported here.
However, balanced against that is the fact the customer will almost always be antagonised by this sort of thing, particularly if (as is so often the case) a member of staff at a different establishment elsewhere has "gone beyond the call of duty", and "sorted something out" for the customer. As a result, the miffed customer is unlikely to frequent the establishment that spurned them again, unless they have no choice but to do so.
At times I ... despair ... at how easy it is for us to get reasonable reviews just by being nice and understanding with customers, help provide what they want when they want it (if we can), and if we can't ... express regret, give reason, suggest alternative.
The problem is, despite doors being open and a member of staff being present, I have either been unable to purchase a cuppa, nor been able to enjoy it relaxing on the comfy seating on rather too many occasions in the recent past for my liking. By contrast, I have turned up at a number of Pumpkin (other national retail outlets specializing in railway stations are available) caf^ shops, and cant remember being refused, despite sailing quite close to the wind closing time-wise several times.
I'm not sure what their official times are ...they're certainly not obviously posted
As a result, as much as I would like, as a general principle, to see Steamers succeed, I tend to avoid using it unless I absolutely have to.
"If you like what we do, tell others ... if you find something wrong, please tell us". I've not been able to find an email address for Steamers, but I do know that they
were owned by the same company that supplies our hotel with lunchtime baguettes when we're running an event. I haven't felt able to raise my concerns with the staff I have met an Steamers, so I'm thinking it might be worth my while (and help get something improved at what is, after all, one of our
CRP▸ stations) if I do a bit of off-board digging. In a way, I'm feeling slightly guilty at my initial rant, but I know that Lee and I are not the only one to have concerns that aspects are below average, and that can't help the business or the keeping of jobs there in the medium term
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