Tales of the Talking Tiger

My girlfriend Rachael doesn’t really like fast food. In fact, she’s never eaten a McDonald’s burger - this is either a bit strange, or a huge claim to fame. I’m trying to move myself into the ‘huge claim to fame’ category. As you can imagine, Rachael’s attitude to fast food made me particularly excited when we stopped at Oporto last Thursday for dinner. She ordered a salad, which would have been a curious choice several years ago, but McDonalds has shown us that fast food ‘restaurants‘ can assemble a reasonably tasty salad. Sadly for Rachael, Oporto’s salad was a woeful affair. Some limp lettuce, shredded carrot, a few slices of soggy tomato and a couple of pieces of warm chicken - for a total of $6.98. As she said at the time, it looks nothing like the picture.

So the next day I thought I’d jump online and send them some feedback. If I made a woeful salad and charged people $6.98 to eat it, I’d hope they’d let me know that this was unacceptable too. This proved more challenging than I would have thought. In the black navigation menu below, can you spot the ‘contact us’ link? I couldn’t, until I saw the tiny first-half of a ‘C’ in the far right. I clicked, and lucky for me, this was in fact the link to the ‘contact us’ page. I get the feeling they don’t want people to contact them.

I then encountered one of the most bizarre feedback forms. When you submit feedback to them, they give you options to select about the nature of your feedback. The first option, naturally, is ‘Compliment’. However, others in the list include ‘Burnt’, ‘Cold food’, ‘Portion Size’, ‘Raw’, ‘Alien Object’ (sounds ominous) and even ‘Alleged Food Poisoning’. Ouch!

What’s scary is that you only need to offer people those options if people are offering feedback along those lines.

I realise they are a food business, and things will go wrong. I’m not sure that it’s such a good idea to give people such detailed ways to complain on the website - it only makes customers more aware of potential problems, and hasn’t left me thinking that I’ve “just gotta go”.

This post is tagged Business, Fast food, Food, McDonald, Oporto