Insulting A Customer On Facebook Won’t Reopen Those Restaurants You Had To Close
When you’re a chain restaurant that recently shuttered all but one location in a town, one might think you’d be a bit grumpy. Crankiness aside, firing a parting shot at a customer on Facebook, like one Houston Tex-Mex chain did, isn’t going to bring back those closed locations. Nope. All it’s going to do is anger and alienate your remaining customers.
The Houston Press says a local Tex-Mex chain got sassy on Facebook this week, after a woman posted a comment rejoicing over one of the chain’s restaurant closures.
“Insulting Houston before we tried your food,” she wrote, “was kinda ‘dee-de-deee’ of you,” the woman wrote.
Whoever manages the chain’s Facebook page certainly took umbrage to her glee at the restaurant closing, writing:
“I thought fat people were suppose [sic] to be jolly!”
And here we thought business owners were supposed to be focused on keeping customers coming in the doors. Silly us!
The woman was referencing some controversial comments the chain’s owner made during an interview with Eater last year which likely ruffled plenty of customers’ feathers. At that time, the co-owner said: “Our clients are old Taco Bell clients who grew up with Taco Bell as Mexican food,” with “palates [that] don’t appreciate what we grew up with as Mexican food.”
And he also managed to generalize women as boozehounds with no taste buds, telling Eater: “We’ve found out consumer decisions are made by women. When we track what makes a woman decide where to eat Mexican food, it has to do with margaritas. It has nothing to do with food.”
This tack might work if we were back in the early 1990s when it was de rigueur to treat customers like total crap (while also doing the YMCA or whatever). But it’s not, so take heed, business owners: kill’em with kindness, not by slinging personal insults on a social medium anyone can read.
Restaurants Behaving Badly: [Restaurant] Calls Houston Woman “Fat” on Facebook [Houston Press]
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