Beer Cafe employees physically assaulted us. Call for justice.

Beer cafe customer
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read

Company response (last): The management has ignored the complaint and refuse to take any action against employees in turn endangering other customers lives. They are also not responding to our request to get hold of CCTV footage of the store.

I have never seen such ignorant response of a severe customer complaint by any company.

Our latest action : The story is covered in mid-day (29th July).


Real Incident

It has been said that if you have a friend that gives you company at 4 am — he is your true friend. Beer cafe for me and my friends (at the international airport) has been one such place where we go mostly in nights as food and drinks are available all day long (24*7).

Since a few months at Beer Cafe I have been noticing something - a lot of the items on the Menu were not available and no clear reasons are given to customers other than just non-availability and a more expensive option was pushed down your throat. Imagine being denied a mendu vada (yes they use to serve it, but removed months back), mocktails not being available due to blender issues and economical beer not available so an option much expensive is presented to you.

The issues become more evident and irking when you visit them very often. As a Loyal Customer and an expectant of good service— You want to record a video and ask questions to employees for submission to management. Well in India — Please don’t dare to do that as it may be life threatening! The employees can break your bones and phone to save them from any trouble from the management. They also feel that because they are running drinking bars, with help from the government authorities they can go to any extent.

One such incident happened with us on Sunday 23rd July — 5AM at International Airport:
It was one of our friend’s birthday (who doesn’t even drink). We decided to go to beer cafe at around 5 a.m.. Three of our friends were slightly drunk and thought we could order some more drinks and food before we call it a night.

As we loved beer cafe so we thought it will be okay to pay parking charges (around 300 Rs.) and still go there as it is one of the most liked places by us.

We reached there and to my surprise, we were informed that economical beer brands(Foster & Kingfisher) are not available so we may have to go for the expensive ones. It was hard to understand why economical beers are not served most of the times and we wanted to see if there were any options available as we did not want to pay more money, at least for this night.

I asked the guy taking our order to speak to their manager. The manager behind our back shouted to come at the counter and talk to him. I enquired why beers are not available. I told him we paid parking charges and came a long distance. His reply was that it is not available and in case you don’t want to pay charges to reach there then better give us a call.

As you can see from the below video (the manager is shouting — remove them from outlet and call housekeeping to beat them).

I thought the reply was rude and not justifiable, as a manager of such a national chain shouldn’t be this rude to their regulars. So I wanted to record a video where the manager says the same thing so I can forward it to management for action and make their service better.

Seeing that he is at fault — he started to talk as if we were really looking for parking refund.

Somehow, the employees did not care if customers came all the way from along distance but they were frightened that the video might be posted online.

As I thought that it is going nowhere I decided it is no point talking to them and closed down my camera and was returning to my table. All of a sudden 5–10 employees on order of the manager started to push us out of the outlet. Not to forget, physical assault was involved.

And while this was happening, I started to tell them is this how beer cafe behaves with customers, and they continued to hit us and push us. They slapped us and what not — they called housekeeping to also be a part of this assault (as can be heard from 2nd video). I was pushed to the edge of the surrounding terrace while 10–12 employees came to hit me and my friends. We all friends did not hit them as we thought they will come to their right senses. I thought they will stop, as physical assault is not justified but they continued. They invited the maintenance guys also like it was an assault party.

As I told them I need to record a video for the whole world to see how we are being beaten up. The manager hit me at my groin and asked employees to take back my cellphone and break it. My friend who was of a good built took my phone to protect it and let the world know what happened.
The surrounding airport police were standing nearby and did not even budge when our friends asked for help. They were busy calling police vans and not saving people on the spot.

The employees kept shouting telling authority lies that we hit them first and what not. The police took us in the van and we asked them to also take the employees into custody as they hit us not the other way around.

During the journey, we friends were frightened as we did not know it will escalate to such an extend while the employees were constantly smiling(including the manager). They were telling the police that we mishandled them as we were drunk and asking them to check if we were drunk. Off course we were coming from a party— but not so much to not understand the difference as how to treat humans and not go after a physical assault.

In the police station — we were taken to a separate room and the employees sat outside. They were constantly laughing — At first I did not know. But later when I reflect on it, they probably knew it all along, that they will get the sympathy for being employees and nothing will happen to them.

*edited some content related to government authorities*

As I could see from the looks of them from another room they were constantly smiling and nothing bothered them despite hitting customers of a chain they work at. Maybe this was our learning as we have never encountered anything of such sort and how our system will behave in these times. People can be judgemental when they see people were have an intake of alcohol. But honestly, it is “Beer” Cafe, need I say more?

*edited some content related to government authorities*

Caution for people:
Please be careful, The way I have seen groups to behave (beer cafe employee staff) and the way system works when you have had alcohol — this can only cause you trouble until we set some right examples.

Call to Beer Cafe Management:

We reported this incident on your twitter & facebook page. None of them reverted after seeing. We called your corporate office and all we got was a promise that someone will contact us but no one did.

My friend and I have suffered mental, physical and financial damage. How in the world physical violence is justified where group of 10–15 people thrash some customers? In case you have a conscience — Get hold of the video footage at your store and at the airport and see how your employees behaved with us and send us the videos so we can get justice and see to that people who assaulted us goes to jail.

In the meanwhile we are filing RTI complaint to get CCTV footage from airport authorities.

Updates on this case

Update 1(Screenshots below): Beer Cafe customers have contacted us with there bad service part.

(This complaint posted on the story’s thread)

Update 2(Screenshot below): Employees at International airport — same branch as incident report were trying to capture video of customer argument few months back as can be seen from this review but when we did, they came after us with assault.

Update 3(Screenshot below): We are shocked as it seems that they might be playing dubious practise as to upsell things calling it stock out / unavailability. In the same outlet, people have reported many times on zomato about stock out issues but no action was taken and the page is filled with asked reviews where servers are asking for reviews with their names to hide negative reviews.

How can beer cafe not have beer. Look for some cases below from their zomato reviews..

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