I got ripped off at my local Chinese restaurant tonight. What bothers me is not so much the money (not tonight’s, anyway), but the fact that I know that this is going to change how I feel about my relationship with this business. This is a place that I’ve built a relationship with. Not much of a relationship, as relationships go in the scheme of things, but (at least the (is she the?) manager) knows my name and I know hers; she knows how old my kids are, she knows what I do for a living and the hours I keep as a result. Importantly for me, too, is that this is a place we’ve established an understanding with so that if we say “no sauce, and only these vegetables”, they know to just do that. That’s rarer than you think, and when you’re dealing with all sorts of allergies in the family, it’s something you value.
Let me tell you about tonight’s concern. I rock up having made a phone order, wait for a while (the front desk being attended only intermittently – kind of odd tonight, because usually only busy times lead to a big wait, but tonight I waited for a while and later discovered that there was only one family in the restaurant), and eventually the manager(?) turns up, and reveals that my food is already waiting for me behind the counter, and has been since I arrived. No biggie; this is common, and if I had been in the shop when it was done, I’d be home and eating it by now. And hey, for that matter I think that there is a bell somewhere (perhaps only some nights?) if I felt like ringing it for attention.
Now, the manager looked at the number of items in the bag, and the number of the order receipt, as she usually does. A quick check that I’ve got everything I’ve ordered. Great. She told me the price, and I think that she said that it was $55.80. I wouldn’t swear to what was said at that stage, but whatever it was didn’t surprise me greatly. I had opted to order a couple of cheap dishes tonight in place of a more expensive one that I order often, and thought that the overall cost would probably be higher. What I do know is that (after we moved to another area to do a card transaction), she checked the adding up with a calculator (in my view), as she often does, and it came out with $55.8. And I remember at the time thinking that that was the same amount she’d told me the first time.
She then went over to the food again, with the order receipt again in hand, and checked it all. looking between the list and the food. She returned to the calculator, tried her luck with the numbers again, and the result was $55.8. She stopped again, went back to the bag of food, and came back to me and said “that’s $57.80″. I was a little surprised, given the triple checking that I’d seen, and the fact that she didn’t say anything like “forgot the __________” to me to explain why she’s had such confusions about the price (when she’s just very obviously been fussing around about what is in the order), and why it wasn’t the price I’d just seen her calculate at least twice, so I said “umm… do you mean fifty-five eighty?”. “No…”, she says, “(pause) I was saying fifty eight eighty before [..I did all of these checks]“. I know that this is small bananas, but I really think I’d have remembered that, because a bill closer to $60 than $50/$55 tends to stand out against what we’d normally order. Because I have a relationship with the place, I opted to say “well, I’ll pay the two bucks and maybe I’m being ripped off a little”. What bothered me was that, being curious by nature, I knew that I was going to have to check the bill when I got home now (I should say, I get a transaction receipt, but they always keep the order receipt themselves), I “knew in my bones”, as much as you ever do, that I was going to find that the order should have cost $55.80, and I knew that it was going to bother me that they’d decided to overcharge me despite their checks. I don’t think that they just decided to try to ring some extra cash out of me, but for whatever reason the manager seemed to have decided that my order couldn’t possibly come out at only $55.80 (I certainly don’t believe that she ever thought I was being overcharged), and rather than trust her triple-check of a regular customer that spent a fair chunk of change with them every week, she (‘m guessing) opted to add $2 to the bill either because it felt like what we’d ordered should cost more, or because she had “one of those feelings” that she was making a mistake somewhere, and wanted to partially cover herself for whatever she was missing.
Okay, so there, in it’s turgid glory, is the story. Here’s what happened when I got home. I added up the bill, checking against ever item. Our home menu could have been slightly outdated price-wise, but given that I had seen several of the item charges that the manager was typing into the calculator (always starting with $27, the price of the three lots of noodles we always get for our allergic contingent), I don’t think so. And I tend to look out for signs that they’ve changed the in-shop menu prices. What was the total? If you guessed $55.80, sweet, gentle, trusting reader, you’re wrong. No, the total was fifty-two dollars and thirty cents. I did some rechecks, no, this was the price. My wife suggested that perhaps we had unknowingly been paying a fee for getting our noodles as we wanted them rather than as they came. I thought this was unlikely, thought it was pretty much certain that it wouldn’t be $5.50, and we did have some past experience of just ordering the noodles and getting a multiple of the $9 menu price tag. Tonight’s noodle component, as usual, was an order of three of the same “no sauce, these veggies” hokkien noodles. I just can’t see them charging for three of something as “a special, extra work order”. So then I thought about the $3.50 that I do believe that they thought I owed then to get up to the $55.80 that they had calculated. In fact, to say I thought about that is overstating things, because as soon as I got my total, I thought “they’ve charged me for the spring rolls, haven’t they?”. I don’t ever order spring rolls, but spring rolls come “FREE with orders of $50 or more” (as it says on the menu, and the board outside their shop), and so they tend to appear unless we’re having a light week on the order front.
So, here is the nub of what bothers me here. Firstly, as I say, it bothers me that it felt like they had made a choice that, in the case of doubt, the best option was to add a couple of bucks to what they charged me. Five months back a petrol station decided to add 34c to my bill for LPG wasted at a pump that wouldn’t pump the gas into my car, and which the employee cheerfully admitted that others had had issues with that day. Worse, she added the 34c while it was clear that I was look into my wallet, and after she had both clearly seen that I was checking what I was being charged, and she had told me how much I owed. I didn’t buy from the station or the parent company for three months; even now, I check to see whether the guilty party is working before I use a pump, and I use that station as a place of necessity when time is tight rather than my first-option, nearest station. The incident tonight, like that petrol incident, bothered me as a trust issue. As I also said, it bothered me because I knew even as it was happening that I was going to find that I was being overcharged, and that this would sour a relationship of trust that I valued.
Secondly, there’s that $3.50. That bothers me on a more practical level. Let me confess that, probably more than I should be, I’m the sort who will treat a difference of $3.50 on a largish item as nothing. In fact, I’ll even tend to extend that to “well if I’m spending fifty bucks anyway, why not also buy this separate item for $30?. But now I’m thinking about this ongoing relationship with this business that decided, in a very small way, to stick it to me rather than risk a (what, at most $12?) loss of revenue for some forgotten item even after three checks of the bill. And now I’m being aware that for the amount that they felt sure about, these people were charging me for the unordered $3.50 bonus item. And then I’m thinking $175 per year. $175 is the amount that I still have not paid for a trip to Melbourne to see Paul F. Tompkins, my favourite stand-up, in probably the only opportunity I’ll ever have to see him live (and see the excellent Maria Bamford while I’m at it). And I haven’t paid it (in part) because I’m having a hard time justifying the expense to the family (admittedly, not just in monetary terms) of having me shoot off to do something entirely self-indulgent for a day or two. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough to make a difference to a few things. It’s the gap amount for at least three speech pathology appointments. Perhaps more importantly, as the speech pathology is happening anyway, it’s enough for two or three occupational therapy appointments for my son, who is otherwise going for stretches of ten weeks at a time with gaps in between them which, in part, act to reduce the total number of appointments per year to a Medicare-supported level.
Anyway, now I’m really starting to digress. The point of this post: we make relationships, even with businesses. When the other party shows us that they’re not really our friend, it can’t help but disappoint. And while you can go through the motions, it’s hard to really invest in a relationship after someone’s let you know that you are low on their list of priorities.
If you are interested in consumer behaviour and our relationship with businesses and price, I recommend Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”.
