Lunching, munching and averted (?) punching

Lunching, munching and averted (?) punching

‘As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices – take it, or leave it’
Buddy Hackett

Something I don’t understand just lately is why, as customers, we are being treated so poorly when we part with our hard earned money.

The concept of ‘The Customer is King’ is all but dead, and it seems as consumers we are not voting with our feet, but simply are noting defeat. We are being directionalised all too often, and seemingly without noticing, or complaining. I like the idea of the customer being king, but not Stephen King. However, I seem to slip into re-enactments of Stephen King’s less normal characters on a seemingly all too often basis… Even the simplest of things that you try and attain as a consumer seems to be all but impossible. I get the impression that I am being ‘boxed’, categorised, effectively told what I want and as an extension of that, I am told what I can have. Isn’t this just a little arrogant, to say the least?

Usually the persons responsible for my categorisation are unknown to me, and I am singularly unknown to them. This is folly. I recall all too well having my parents tell me what I could have and couldn’t have, from birth to way past adolescence. I vividly recall taking exception to this, still do, so why is it that it is thought I am prepared to have perfect strangers tell me what I can, and cannot, have, or do?

Fast food joints are prime examples of this. The main chains of fast food joints these days don’t even have a menu. They do have a plethora of meals and combinations that ‘research’ tells them consumers want. This approach angers me and it treats their customers in the way they see them… like sheep. Everyone isn’t the same. People have differences and differing preferences. But if your preference doesn’t match the masses, you are shit out of luck. This was especially true in the Philippines, but now seems virtually ‘de rigeur’ most anywhere.

Take the good ole Colonel’s chicken for example. You could buy two piece meals with rice or bread, one piece meals with rice or bread, or a bucket of chicken with six pieces, and all manner of other meal ‘packages’. But I didn’t want rice. I didn’t want bread either. And I did want three pieces of chicken with fries and a small soft drink. Could I get that? NO. Could you take the cost of six pieces and halve it? NO. Is there anyway to get this choice of food? Why of course there is.

All I had to do was buy a two piece chicken meal, a one piece chicken meal, and additional fries. Then give away two servings of rice, two servings of coleslaw or gravy and one small soft drink that I have had to buy, but didn’t want. Then I was left with three pieces of chicken, fries and a small coke. Perfect. All this cost more than half a six piece bucket, fries and small coke… way more, in fact.

As the consumer I am forced to develop a strategy for getting the meal I actually want, and thereafter how to deploy the mechanics to become a satisfied (?) customer. Hmm. Isn’t satisfying me someone else’s job? However, the deployment aspect is always pure entertainment, because invariably a human interaction is necessary. A standardised series of boxed meal offerings is simple enough, because permutations are decidedly limited. This means that employees can function cognitively at automaton levels, until someone like me wants something different… then all hell breaks loose. The person serving you becomes totally unhinged the minute any meal option isn’t selected, resulting in the search for managerial prowess.

Enter the managerial prowess, and it is clear that this person was once at the level of the person to whom you were originally speaking, in creative terms. And by once, I mean still is.
Inevitably the manager takes great pride and effort to explain why all meals are presented in the way they are, because the consumer wants it that way, (according to their research). It would appear that because I didn’t take part in their research, which undoubtedly was my fault, naturally, I thus am representative of nothing. The manager will then take equal time to inform you that your request “just isn’t possible”… apparently, it isn’t possible to sell me three pieces of chicken.

Nowadays I just ask for stupid things whenever I order from fast food joints, even if they do have what I want. I enjoy asking for a regular sized coke in an upsized cup, or just a little ice, or extra salt for fries, or whatever. Anything basically to just retain some sense of actual choice where a permutation hasn’t been pre-selected for me.

I often wonder if customers of fast food joints are intellectually challenged and whether they typically struggle with a menu list. Perhaps choosing a meal item, a carbohydrate accompaniment and a drink is a bit of a stretch, given the plethora of choice. When you think about it, the number of permutations possible in ordering a fast food meal is pretty staggering – I know I often find myself pondering for hours over the sheer choice of offerings and the culinary anticipation that ensues. Regularly I arrive at a decision only to find that my lunch choice is now, in fact, dinner, and to boot my shirt now needs to be changed from the veritable monsoon of gustatory stimulated saliva that has escaped my lips in anticipation, during the process.

The concept of a fast food joint is relatively simple in standard operating procedural terms. There are rigid processes for everything to attain consistency. These procedures are followed to the letter by all employees who have been subjected to the fast food chain’s rote and little-explained learning. This is an ISO 900(n) certifiers dream environment. Unfortunately, I am not in the business of certifying businesses for ISO accreditation. I just want a bloody meal, a meal with three pieces of chicken, and whether these outlets are certified or not, I feel the way these food joints operate is certifiable. Why do service companies operate on the basis that customers have to fit their needs? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Another thing that makes me smile in all these fast food places is the availability of ‘diet’ drinks. Why on earth would you provide diet drinks (and more lately, nutritionally balanced healthy meals) in a fast food joint? Surely people aren’t choosing ‘diet’ drinks because it tastes better, are they? Of all the places you could buy food for the health conscious, would this group of people choose a fast food joint? Isn’t this a tad odd?

I have to smile when I see a single someone order fast food fit for more than one person, yet then order low calorie drinks. This beats the hell out of me. You know the kind of person I am talking about… typically a large person, nay massively obese person, (usually a one man traffic jam), of proportions that confuse time tested ratios between human height and breadth. The kind of person who is always worried that the floor loading restrictions under their feet may be compromised by their very singular presence at any moment.
“I’d like a large size 17 kilo stuffed pizza with extra carbs and cholesterol please, thick crust, garlic bread, and a diet coke.”
Am I missing something here? What’s with the diet drinks?

If you join Fitness First, I don’t believe their inducement campaigns offer you a deep fat fryer upon membership. Athletic wear on promotion in malls don’t offer “buy this and get a free tub of lard”. The latest and greatest sports shoes may well have sensors to monitor heart rate and all, yet so far they haven’t offered a packet of Marlboro as a point of sale inducement, anymore than a Lamborghini Diablo comes with a years supply of motion sickness pills and cabin interior matched child seats... So what’s with the diet drink? It surely is equally nonsensical.

Elsewhere, fast food takes on totally befuddling proportions…

Pizza joints in Hong Kong are a misnomer, or at the very least a surreptitious operation. They aren’t pizza joints at all if they have a salad bar… they can’t be. I believe that most any pizza joint with a salad bar, in Hong Kong, is actually not in the business of selling food at all. It is a training ground for civil engineers and architects.

The scenario in many of these pizza joints is that you can buy a side salad, visit the salad cart once for your purchase price, with one bowl, and fill that bowl with whatever salad you choose. The bowl is an ordinary bowl – not a basin, (the type of bowl I use to eat cereal [pigeon droppings] with dried fruit and half a litre of milk).

However, Hong Kong residents bring feats of engineering prowess to the filling of this bowl that make the construction of any building seen at skyscrapercity.com look decidedly unadventurous and vapid. Just sit and watch someone at the salad bar in a pizza joint in Hong Kong, and you become abundantly aware of just how creativity and tenacity is alive and well there, if not flourishing.

Each type of salad item is systematically chosen and placed to provide for structural support… structural support for the rest of the salad to be accommodated in this one bowl. The bowl is but a mere three inches high and with a six inch diameter. However, this is purely if you limit your thinking and perception to the bowl itself. The civil salad engineers have freed themselves of such limitations, and are committed to accommodating salad items within this bowl that requires mechanical assistance to lift and can easily feed a grown up family of 6 with all their relatives in tow… this gives new meaning to the management terminology “inverted pyramid” structures.

The sheer tenacity in managing to remove so much food, in such a small bowl, to feed so many people, is magnificent. However, when one has created the vegetative structural equivalent of Singapore’s entire Integrated Resort project, (including much spillage at the salad bar and the surrounding area, with ensuing requisite reclamation), it baffles me how one could actually enjoy a salad like this. How do you eat it?

A mere disturbance of the air is sufficient to invoke Richter scale food redistribution from the engineering feat, and notwithstanding this, the elements of the superstructure have been strategically placed to provide support for each layer. How do you get to choose what you actually want to eat? It isn’t possible to do this without bring down the whole salad superstructure.

A further major gripe of mine is when accompaniments are not in tow… (We are talking in the culinary sense here, as opposed to mere accessorising, or partners).

You know the story. It’s around the time when that feeling stimulates a thought that is more than plain hunger. One begins to have gustatory flights of fancy and from the depths of memory a certain type of food seemingly just appears in your consciousness and this is thereafter the ‘faire of choice’. Usually this food type appears unwittingly, and oft with recollections of past experiences, people, places where it was once enjoyed… the desire builds and the need for this particular food has unstoppable momentum now that it has been fully emotionalised in multi-sensory terms.

This is no longer a whim, a take it or leave it munch or passing snack. This is the Food of the Gods to all intents and purposes and could be anything from a packet of Walker’s salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps, to fish and chips, to gravlax, sushi, or a fillet mignon. Whichever it is, it’s a must seek, must find food and essentially you are Elwood Blues on a ‘mission from God’ to find it.

Usually, when making choices of this nature, it is common that the choice requires an accompaniment of some kind to complete the culinary feast. If it’s fish and chips, then as a true Brit salt and vinegar has to be available. It doesn’t matter if the fish and chips are to die for… without salt and vinegar, it doubtless becomes papier-mâchè and fries. Lamb is inedible without mint sauce / jelly, and a decent piece of beef just becomes indecent without mustard (and that’s English Mustard, Dijon at the worst, and NOT American hotdog mustard), plus of course, horseradish sauce.

These are well known accompaniments, yet how often do we arrive at an eatery, order the very thing that our sensory system is thoroughly captivated with, only then to find upon arrival of the food that the accompaniment isn’t available. This seems to happen to me quite regularly, and is thoroughly disappointing. To make matters worse, the accompaniment-less server offers totally unsuitable alternatives, unless the eatery is a purveyor of fine faire. Fish and chips requires malt vinegar… not balsamic / white / cane / red wine / white wine / apple cider et al vinegar, but MALT. End of discussion.

Why is this so hard to get right? People in the restaurant are abundantly aware of what customers typically ask for as accompaniments, so if they run out of these staples, then why is the main item still on the menu? At the very least it should be pointed out that whilst a menu item remains, certain potential accompaniments are not available.

I regularly send food back if the accompaniment I want isn’t available, and proceed to then choose something I probably don’t want, given that my sensory needs remain unsatisfied. Yet the act of sending the food back is greeted with dismay, as opposed to regret. Your culinary flight of fancy becomes a plight that’s a tad chancy… especially when you find the original item still on the bill. I find this weird. Why do restaurants assume that the accompaniments are not an integral part of the meal? Of course they are.

Half of the employees in most restaurants these days are of alien extraction, of that much I am sure. They seem to be able to purposefully function in time space planes known only to non human species. Their ability to display total detachment, lack of forethought, and complete obliviousness to their immediate place of operation is comparable in human terms only to the time when George W Bush actually waved back at Stevie Wonder at a benefit gig. The lights are on, but no one’s home, and the intellect brought to bear in their chosen working environment is indicative of a person who has not enough coupons for the percolator and matching set of cups.

Recently my good lady and I decided to partake in a fried food extravaganza, at a typical American joint resplendent with a fried menu and faux stained glass lampshades. Upon entry we asked for something that upon reflection was pretty damned unreasonable, to be honest. We requested a table with some space. By this we meant a table that could accommodate a svelte Singaporean lady, and a Caucasian whose frame whilst swimming in the sea attracts Japanese with telephoto lenses expecting to have a whale of a time. By space we meant room… we were not expecting a table with zero gravity.

We were shown to a table that was up against a wall and would have challenged a dwarf with anorexia issues. I literally could not use my left hand to eat as my elbow had been rendered paralysed by the seating arrangement. This was the smallest eating surface in the whole restaurant, and the largest guy was placed there, having requested a little more space. Hmm.

The manager was summoned and she offered to be extremely accommodating. We could vacate our seats, and then take our place at the back of the queue outside the restaurant, where we had already queued once, and then be seated again. How nice. How accommodating. Am I missing something here? At times like this I revert to childhood memories. This isn’t because I become petulant, but is linked to ornithology. My voice when angry becomes a fabulous tonal re-enactment of a mating bittern, with matched intensity, and a melee usually ensues for my personal satisfaction and the amusement of nearby bystanders within a 12km radius.

We eventually chose to eat elsewhere, after our rational argumentation had initially failed, and after I then had subtly reminded the manager that colonoscopies are best done by medical practitioners, so to have her head up her own backside is largely a pointless exercise.

Isn’t this all kind of baffling, and spectacularly unnecessary in the main? After all, apart from paying the salaries and delivering profits to these establishments, as the customer, who the hell am I anyway?

Nonetheless, I suppose it is certainly food for thought.