If You Care About the Customer Experience at All? Don’t Treat People Like This.

Some companies — like the Dick’s Last Resort restaurant chain — build a brand out of mistreating their customers.

And that’s fine. If the schtick is entertaining enough that people keep coming back for more, and overt hostility to your customers is working for you, do your thing.

What perplexes me is a less intentional (and sadly more common) unwelcoming vibe toward the people who keep you in business. Take, for instance, this list of preemptive admonitions at the bottom of a Bay Area restaurant’s menu:

I have so many questions.

• Is a $20 per person minimum necessary when your entrees start at $18?
• Is it all that difficult to split checks in 2018? (Spoiler alert: it is not.)
• A 20% auto-gratuity is standard for parties of six or eight, but five? Plus it’s added to checks dropped after 11:30 p.m.? Why not just … close the kitchen earlier?
• What happens when a table runs up against the two-hour time limit — do you kick them out?
• Unless you’re the French Laundry, $30 is unreasonable for a corkage fee. And the additional $10 for sparkling wines is because … ?
• If a table brings in a birthday cake for a party of eight, you’re really going to add $16 to the bill? What if some of them order their own dessert? Or don’t eat cake?
• Did the person who wrote that last line — “Not responsible for lost or damaged articles or feelings :)” — think that adding that smiley face canceled out the rudeness? And what is a lost or damaged feeling, anyway? (At any rate, they are not responsible, so.)

Businesses who care about the customer experience don’t make people feel unwelcome like this. Perhaps cable monopolies and airlines can get away with poor service to an extent, but what are businesses in more competitive industries doing treating patrons as though they’re likely to misbehave?

Part of running a business is accepting that a small percentage of your clientele are going to take advantage — many subscription-model SaaS companies are aware of a select few users who routinely downgrade their plans a day before their billing cycle each month, or that sort of thing. It happens.

But when you run a customer-first company, the only approach is to mitigate that bad-apple behavior without alienating the majority of good customers who don’t deserve surveillance, jacked-up prices or etiquette lessons.