Would You Send It Back?

Last night my wife and I went out for a bite to eat after having our taxes done. We both ordered drinks. My wife ordered a Dos Equis but the waitress brought her a Heineken. I can see where this could happen, the bartender probably just looked down, saw a green bottle and grabbed it. My wife took one sip and said 'this is not Dos Equis', she turned the bottle around and saw the Heineken label and said, ' I told you it wasn't a Dos Equis'. So when the waitress came back to take our order, my wife informed her that she got the wrong beer and the waitress offered to take it back. I told her I would drink it and she could leave it on the bill, just grab my wife a Dos Equis.

I came into work today and started looking for Strange But True stories and I found an article about people's eating habits and sending things back at restaurants. I thought to myself, this must be a sign to blog about this after what happened last night.

Let me start by saying that I used to work in a restaurant. I was washing dishes when I was 14 and worked my way up to assistant manager before I left that restaurant. If someone sent food back for a legitimate reason I was okay with that. I used to get ticked off when we were really busy and someone would send something back for a mistake that they made, not us. For example, someone would order a steak medium rare. We would send it out medium rare and they would send it back with the instructions to cook it longer. Do you not know what medium rare means? Or another thing that would tick me off would be when the menu clearly said what the dish contained, but it would come back a couple minutes later, and the waitress would say 'they didn't want mushrooms with this'. It says right on the menu it comes with mushrooms, why didn't they order it without mushrooms?

Anyway, back to the article I found today on YouGov. The story said that overall, 39% of people said they're either somewhat uncomfortable or very uncomfortable with sending something back at a restaurant. The study went on to ask the following questions. What would you do if there was a hair in your food, if your food came out on a dirty plate, or if your entire meal was wrong? Would you send it back? Again having worked in a restaurant, I usually just let mistakes go because I understand that nobody's perfect and people make mistakes. See the results to those questions on the YouGov website.

Would you send it back?

[via YouGov]