Anchovies and Customer Service

The world of fast food is built upon consistency. McDonald’s goal is for a Big Mac made yesterday in Alaska to look and taste exactly like one made today in Wyoming. As anyone who has worked in fast food knows, this type of precision comes from tight controls that leave little room for thinking outside the box.

As you may recall, I spent a few years in the late 80s and early 90s making pizzas. Although I worked for a few different pizza chains, all of them maintained tight control over their brand. Every employee wore the same uniform. When making dough, every step of the recipe had to be followed exactly. The ovens were always set to the same temperature; their conveyors were always set to the same speed. Every large pepperoni pizza got 32 pepperonis, a green cup full of cheese, and was cut into ten slices. Everything was the same, at every store, every time.

Which is why I was shocked the time my manager yanked the phone out of my hand and told a customer we served anchovies on our pizzas.

Loverboy was a film released in 1989 that starred Patrick Dempsey as a college-aged pizza delivery driver, moonlighting on the side as a gigolo. To request Dempsey’s dating services, all female customers had to do was order a large Loco pizza with extra anchovies. Loverboy may have been the first time I actually saw a pizza with anchovies on it. I certainly had never seen one in person. I understand that anchovies were one of the traditional Italian ingredients served on pizzas; that being said, nobody ever accused any of the pizza joints I worked for of serving traditional Italian cuisine.

The man who called Pizza Inn that evening wasn’t looking for gigolo services (at least I hope not). The guy was legitimately curious to know if we could serve anchovies on our pizzas. My boss must have heard me repeating the request back the caller — I may have even been laughing at the time. Before I had a chance to say another word, my manager had literally snatched the phone’s receiver from my grasp and taken over. After apologizing for my ineptitude, my manager told the customer we would gladly put anchovies on his pizza.

After finishing the order, my manager turned to me, and I’ll never forget what he said.

“Never tell a customer we can’t do something.”

Then he handed me five bucks and told me to get my ass to the nearest supermarket and buy a can of anchovies.

For what it’s worth, the story didn’t have a happy ending for the customer. The grocery store closest to our restaurant was sold out of anchovies and so I returned with a can of sardines (fish are fish, right?) instead. Oh, you should have smelled those sardines as they sizzled and burned their way through those conveyor ovens. The kitchen smelled like toasted fish all weekend.

The point was never the anchovies, of course. My manager knew the biggest hurdle in business was getting people to walk through the front door (or in this case, call). Once you had a customer on the “hook,” you had to put forth effort — not just to make them happy that time, but to keep them coming back. There were and are a lot of pizza places around the metro, and my boss wanted to keep his customers coming back.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a “discussion” with a drive-thru employee in regards to how many packets of hot sauce I was allotted. First, the employee asked me if I wanted hot sauce. When I said I did, he asked me how many packets I wanted. I wasn’t prepared for that question, so I said a dozen. “No,” he said, “that’s too many.” When I suggested ten, he said that was also too high. Around the time, words spicier than the hottest hot sauce began to spew from my mouth and I knew I would have to avoid this particular location for a few weeks until the heat subsided.

(For the record, the young man at the drive-thru explained that there was a limit of three hot sauce packets per item. Since I had only purchased three items, the maximum number of hot sauce packets I could request was nine — not ten.)

Every time I order food to go, it seems like I’m missing napkins or utensils, or my order is wrong, or I get asked to pull up and park, or some combination of them all. (Getting parked and then having the wrong food brought out is the worst.) Last week for Mason’s birthday, we ordered four pizzas from Pizza Hut to be delivered for his party. We placed the order three days in advance, and requested that the pizzas arrive at 6 p.m., the same time as our guests. The pizzas arrived 45 minutes late, and the order was wrong. When my wife called the restaurant to complain, the manager decided to remake the pizzas and have them sent out. They arrived 90 minutes after the party began.

Every now and then a restaurant goes above and beyond to make things right, but those experiences seem few and far between. The norm these days seem to be subpar service and disappointing experiences.

The world could use a few more anchovies.