Guests are angry.

Josh Hurst has encountered his share of angry guests throughout his time at Pies & Pints, a beer and pizza chain with locations in the midwest, interior east, and south.

Through all the downs and ups, Josh and his team have relied on the same 5-step process to deal with angry customers. Here it is:

1. First: don't get defensive or accusatory. You just need to understand this guest is upset and for them that feeling is very real. Whether it's justified or not isn't relevant.
2. Apologize. A genuine "I'm sorry this happened" can go a long way—for Pies & Pints, a sincere apology redirects the interaction to positive about 75% of the time. (Admittedly, prior to Covid this % was higher.)
3. Ask the guest: what can we do to make things right?
4. Follow through on what they request. Give them a new pizza on the house. Discount their meal. Provide a gift certificate for a future visit. It's almost certainly worth it, since they'll be more likely to return.
5. After the dust settles, figure out what went wrong on your side. And when you figure it out, use the situation as a teaching opportunity (not a punitive one).

Check out the interview clips for more from Josh about angry guests, including how complaints are different in the post-Covid world (e.g. oddly, scams have become more common!):

Why?

For a beer drinker there isn’t much worse than getting excited about a beer you’re going to order, ordering it, then being told it’s no longer available.

You’re disappointed, and instead of straight-up joy, you’re starting the night off with a bad experience.

(The experience isn’t much better for the bartender—I know from experience.)

Depending on how out-of-date your menu is and how many folks come in, you could be providing dozens of folks a bad start to their visit.

You should avoid this experience, even if updating a menu is a pain in the ass (though it doesn’t have to be—more on that below).

How?

You can do this manually. How you implement it depends on what works for your team, but it could look like this:

• Create an editable menu doc in Google Docs, Word, Powerpoint, or whatever
• Make sure everyone has access to the doc and knows how to update it
• Make updating the menu part of the opening checklist and/or shift change checklist

It certainly takes some time, but if you avoid just a few bad customer experiences, that time is well worth it.

• For years, "moderate" has been defined as 1 drink a day for women and 2 drinks a day for men.
• This led a lot of folks to characterize moderate drinking as a good thing—a couple glasses of red wine each day was actually good for you. It was basically medicine. (My father in law remains one of these people.)
• But recently, some academics have taken another look at the methods of the studies that gave us those findings. They've found some issues.
• Those old studies compared the health of people who did not drink with the health of people who drank moderately. That makes sense.
• But current-day researchers found that the non-drinking group in these studies contained some people with pre-existing, chronic, and other health conditions.
• True, these people didn't drink, but they shouldn't have been included in the analysis.
• Why? Because they skewed the data. Their health outcomes were worse (obviously), so much so that they pulled down the average health outcomes for the entire non-drinking group.
• This made the non-drinking group's health outcomes look worse than they should have, indeed worse than the moderate drinking group.
• And if you pull out the folks w/ those health issues from the non-drinking group—which current researchers say you should, and which makes sense to me—you find that the non drinking group actually has better outcomes than the moderate drinking group.
• I.e. That glass of red wine is not good for you.
• All this has led to new, lower recommended daily drinking in the country's latest proposed national dietary guidelines.
• Some alcohol producers, however, have pushed back on the new guidelines, saying that, actually, these new findings are flawed because they include in their analysis folks who drink more than moderately.
• If this is the case, then the data is getting skewed in a different direction.
• And these producers aren't alone in offering pushback—there are about 100 members of congress who've requested that the new guidelines be delayed in light of this alleged bias.

So where are we going to land here?

• We'll just have to wait and see. It doesn't seem like the dust has fully settled, but the preponderance of the coverage seems to suggest that we're headed away from considering moderate drinking good for you.
• What that means for the industry is unknown at this point.