The Customer is not always Right

Went with the family to the Rainforest Cafe. Let me first say this is a very cool place and I love the food, atmosphere and fish tanks. But I realized even the coolest place in the world can sometimes get stuck in the rut of maintaining their rules rather than helping the customer.

The instance I am refering to was after our meal we decided to go into the gift area and buy some stuff. They had some coffee mugs for sale 2 for $11.99. So we decided to get two different mugs from the same sale. But when we went to the counter to buy them the manager told us that we cannot mix and match because it was two different sales. We were like dude, it's the same sale no matter what mug we buy. So he finally says it's two different companies selling the mugs. Anyway I didn't buy one.

I remember when I worked at McDonald's a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I was working the drive through and had made a mistake on the order for the customer which they knew nothing about. I gave them a free soda, which they ordered and I forgot to add to the order. My mistake not theirs. So I gave it to them. At that moment the manager was standing behind me and began to interrogate me as to why I gave them a soda for free. The way she acted was like I just gave the whole store away and now they will be in hawk to recoup the money. Guess what? Years later it has become policy to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.

Apparently Rainforest Cafe does not have that policy. Yes, I will still go back to eat there but I won't be buying anything in the gift shop.

What did I learn from this? In the church world we can become pretty dogmatic about how we do things. And even more dogmatic when someone challenges us on how we do them. We must be able to learn and bend on how things are done. The message never changes but the methods will. So we should be willing to listen to those we minister too, they just might have a better way to do things. And in the process we won't turn people away from hearing the Greatest Message the world will ever hear because we were unwilling to listen to them.

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