UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 46Lack of Tartar Sauce Tact

Mistakes happen. Nobody expects a brand or a person to be infallible.¹ Sometimes people come so close to a remedy and then make the whole thing worse. It can be adding a self-serving sentence to an apology post on Facebook. It can be saying “I'm sorry it offended you” versus simply saying “I'm sorry.” Or it can be like the experience I had at Red Lobster when I was 13.

For me to recall something that happened 25 years ago that has nothing to do with comic books, RoboCop, or the Detroit Lions losing means it has to be pretty impressive—and yet this is a subtle story. My family went out to dinner at Red Lobster, where my siblings and I were getting along not so smashingly, as usual. A waiter walking by accidentally spilled a bright red drink on my older brother. Outside of the immense happiness this caused me at that moment, the waiter appeared sincerely apologetic about staining my brothers $12 dress shirt. He immediately offered to pay for dry cleaning.

So, case closed, right? Mistake happens, apology made, remedy done.

Except when the server came back with a business card from the restaurant manager, it said on the back of it, “Good for one dress shirt and dress pant dry cleaning ONLY.” Just like that, with only in all caps and also double underlined.

Even at the innocent age of 13, I wondered if there had been a rash of underground dry cleaning being billed to this Red Lobster location that it needed to have an all-caps stop put to it? Were ...