« Appreciated: "The Endurance". | Main

January 09, 2007

The Universal Waitron Marketing Analogy Experience

Tom Kane of the Legal Marketing Blog recently posted Do Clients Wish You Were Like a Good Waiter?, commenting on a Seth Godin piece "What Waiters Can Teach Marketers". Godin's of course has done some innovative, noteworthy and interesting work--but like most gurus, he is over-quoted and over-sucked up to whether his last post was brilliant or not. What I want to know is what Tom Kane, who many of us also admire, thinks that the waiter experience teaches us about marketing. While Tom is thinking about that, I'll weigh in on waiting tables, and try hard to sound like a dang guru.

In 1980, I briefly waited tables--we preferred the term "waitron" to waiter--at a Capitol Hill bar (the one where in 1986 I had my last drink). Kelly's Irish Times was a noisy, demented paradise, with demanding, obnoxious drunken customers 7 nights, and mornings, a week. The bar's staff was also to die for, and Just Like Me: Young, Irish and Drunk. And I was a waiter, and a very bad one, technically. But I worked hard, and the customers could see that, as clumsy and dazed as I often was, I was really into doing my job. Still, I never got anyone's order right the first time, was late with my orders, and mixed things up. I didn't listen to people well under fire. ("Ah, Danny! Mother of God...We needed Bushmills, not Jamesons, yuh sad simple creature...Jesus...") Also, I drank and smoked heavily (a big perc of any Kelly's job) while I worked. I mouthed off freely and expertly as I could to customers I clashed with. The Dublin-born owner, a city boy like me, was a friend of mine--but I could have cared less anyway if a patron with a unintelligible off-the-boat brogue said, "yuh know, Danny, oh, Jesus...we haven't seen yuh, lad, for, like, over an hour-and-a-half..." or some other uncalled-for, insensitive country, County Cork remark.

But I was tipped, and tipped heavily, night after night. I became the "star" waiter/waitron, even with the other Irish guys and womenfolk who weren't thrilled with my nightly service. Why? How? Because night after night, I talked to, sat down with, drank with, smoked with, joked with and generally engaged and had real conversations with the customers about things they wanted to talk about. Kelly's Irish Times was about fun--not perfect service, food or drink. And having fun with the customer was about all I had to offer as a Kelly's "O'waitron".

Two nights ago I had dinner at a place called The Ivy, a much nicer and more expensive restaurant than Kelly's, and with actual and real food, in Santa Monica, California. Our waitron, an aspiring actress from the Midwest, and not anyone's "type" at our table, was new to LA, and probably just as new to waiting tables. In fact, she was pretty bad. But she was totally immersed in what she was doing, eager to please and totally immersed in us, at her table. We tipped our LA waitron big time.

Posted by JD Hull at January 9, 2007 11:04 PM

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?