So who pays?

When you get a free meal who pays for it? Like when the delivery people (not the rider per se but the entire series of events and people linked to order taking, production and delivery) screw up? Go and read what happened to me just today around 3-4pm with a pizza chain. It really worries me to no end. I’ll post on fides quarens intellectum the philosophical and moral aspect and here the queries on who pays.

So when it all boils down to customer satisfaction issues and the firm has to pay, who gets hit with the bill? Is it attributed to an item in the F/S? Or does a real, actual, living, human being get hit with the tab instead? For example my girlfriend and I ate at a semi-fancy restaurant in Ortigas/Mandaluyong (its there just guess). Inside her iced tea there was a sticker from a wine bottle (yes wine bottle) we complained about it. The man in charge was really calm and good so we had no reason to bitch about it. The food was great (and she paid for it I’m so cheap) but the iced tea just had to have that sticker floating in it. So the person (I don’t know his rank or position) was asking what we wanted so we asked him to just cancel the iced tea, and he said that desserts would be on the house. I was opting to decline but didn’t know at the time it was Free (though in hind-sight I think that I already knew I was just a little not used to getting really free food from restaurants) so my girlfriend subtly insisted (I don’t know how she does it) to get a cake. So we did it was great, caramel cheesecake something. So who gets hit with the extra 168 pesos and the 70 peso iced tea?

 Much like my experience today, who got hit with the bill which amounted to 905? It’s in tax (my weakest subject) that you can shift the tax you get charged to someone else, also known as a direct tax. By analogy we can say that this bill because of my dissatisfaction would be shifted away from me and onto someone else. But who? In my post I tracked down who will be blamed for my dissatisfaction once they logged it into their books. The branch told me it would be production that would get hit, I asked the rider about it and he told me he wouldn’t be billed the 905. 

So who pays? Is it absorbed as shrinkage by the establishment? 

From my experience running Picky Eaters I think that it would be the establishment that’d absorb the hit. I remember sometime during the middle of the 5 month period that a former classmate of mine in philosophy approached our stall with a complaint that we did not place an order (I think she asked for 4 burgers and we were only able to give 2 in her take out bag) in her take out bag. She ordered the 4 burgers the day before and took home the bag, the following day she went to our stall and complained. I was tasked to handle the situation and fortunately I happened to know the person. So I said okay you don’t have to worry I’ll give you two new burgers I’m really sorry about this this’ll never happen again. So there problem solved. But the thing is I couldn’t just blame our personnel at the time. They’d be working 8 hours-10 hours a day and during lunch and 4pm they’d be flooded with customers. So I didn’t have the heart to charge them the lost order nor did I even give it any thought at all. This was my experience as a proprietor but now the tables have turned. I am on the other side of the line now, complaining of my order. 

In a firm as big as that from which I ordered it would be strange if it absorbed all of the errors that were bound to happen. It would likewise be unconscionable to charge the personnel everytime. So in the end who pays? If I were to assign someone to suffer the loss I’d pin it on the establishment and not on any crew member. Obviously the delay was due to a failure of their system. Company policy also mandated that they give me my free order. So I’m going to stick with the thought that its the firm that will absorb the loss and try to sleep well tonight.