Things can get ugly quickly. This story from Houston seems like a harbinger of things to come:
was having drinks at Down House on Sunday night when she posted a Tweet, since deleted, wherein she called a bartender a “twerp” for quoting Bobby Heugel — the owner of Anvil Bar & Refuge — and appended her statement with the hashtag #jackass#jackoff.
Matsu has achieved mild, local notoriety for her late-night Tweets, even recently winning aHouston Press Web Award for that very activity. Down House, for its part, has achieved a reputation in the short time that it’s been open for having capricious service. The two collided in a Twitter-fueled spectacle that resulted in general manager Forrest DeSpain calling the bar, speaking shortly with Matsu, and asking her to be ejected from his establishment.
“She called him a twerp,” DeSpain said by phone yesterday afternoon. DeSpain runs the Twitter account for Down House and was agitated that someone would bully his bartender, as he saw it, and took action despite not being at the restaurant that night. “I immediately called up here and talked to her for a few minutes and asked her if she had any kinder words.” She didn’t, DeSpain said, so he asked her to leave.
I prefer to stay on the positive side of things when I think about where social media and real-life meet. But as more of our lives are shared in real-time, and are geo-located, incidents like the one mentioned above are much more likely to crop up. Restaurants and other businesses that are subject to social media interactions taking place in real-time need to develop policies and protocols for situations just like this.
The truth, however unfair, is this: when these incidents happen, most outsiders are immediately and inherently going to sympathize with the client. A woman leaving a restaurant in tears after being berated on the phone by a manager? Not good. Who knows if the woman was drunk? Or overly aggressive? Shit, maybe she works for a rival restaurant and is just causing trouble.
We have all been trained that the customer is always right, especially in a place like a restaurant or a bar. Anyone who goes out regularly knows these situations crop up form time to time, though of course most of the time, the situation never gets close to the intensity and seriousness of this incident.
But because consumers and the general public will almost always, at least initially, side with the offended customer, businesses needed to be extra careful how they handle these instances. Customers can be bullies no doubt. And a business owner should always protect their team members and employees from an aggressive and offending customer. This really is new territory.
I have a recurring fear about tweeting something unsatisfactory about a chef or a particular dish and having that chef or general manager see my tweet and confront me. I wonder if I would be able to collect myself and back up my critique, or cave and apologize. I really don’t know.