Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
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Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#2This guy, Ben Edelman, focuses a lot of his work on online advertising issues. The question here is that his campaign against the Chinese restaurant, although technically correct (they did charge higher prices than advertised online) is wildly disproportionate.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#3This is such a brilliant example of how attention to detail and treating every customer as your most valuable customer is crucial. Such a simple situation to show:
1. you never know which customer is the one that will tweet/publish their experience (good or bad). Offering to pay the $12 immediately would have solved this and caused no negative PR
2. you have to make sure your entire business and it's assets are up to date, all the time. It might be a rookie mistake to have a website that the proprietor can't update ... but I feel they plain forgot to make the change. If your website isn't integral to the way you run your business and considered in every decision you make, close down your website.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#4The proprietor has apologized more than twice in the emails.I do not think it is fair for the HBS professor to take such drastic measures because a hapless businessman did not understand enough HTML to update a website frequently.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#5A good lesson that all emails are potentially public :)
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#6Ben Edelman has been instrumental in the fight against malicious advertisers. It takes patience and diligence to demonstrate illegal online advertising. Ben is one of the few people that does it well. That said he should go easy on this restaurant...the owner seems knowingly ignorant that he was overcharging customers.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#7This is such a brilliant example of how attention to detail and treating every customer as your most valuable customer is crucial. Such a simple situation to show: 1. you never know which customer is the one that will tweet/publish their experience (good or bad). Offering to pay the $12 immediately would have solved this and caused no negative PR 2. you have to make sure your entire business and it's assets are up to…
Perhaps so, but this exchange also reflects incredibly poorly on the complainer in this case.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#8The proprietor has apologized more than twice in the emails.I do not think it is fair for the HBS professor to take such drastic measures because a hapless businessman did not understand enough HTML to update a website frequently.
The proprietor also had the opportunity to credit back the customer's money twice - having the wrong advertised prices on a menu is the proprietor's mistake. In the first response, the owner should have offered to credit back the $4 not just send an updated menu. This likely would have diffused the whole situation. And then on the second reply when asked for $12 he shouldn't have just offered $3 (not even the full amount). It's an antipattern for running a small business to not honor a lower price if an employee (or website) misquoted a lower price than is usual. And in most jurisdictions it is also illegal.
Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#9This guy, Ben Edelman, focuses a lot of his work on online advertising issues. The question here is that his campaign against the Chinese restaurant, although technically correct (they did charge higher prices than advertised online) is wildly disproportionate.
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Re: Harvard Business School Professor Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food
#10This is such a brilliant example of how attention to detail and treating every customer as your most valuable customer is crucial. Such a simple situation to show: 1. you never know which customer is the one that will tweet/publish their experience (good or bad). Offering to pay the $12 immediately would have solved this and caused no negative PR 2. you have to make sure your entire business and it's assets are up to…
Perhaps so, but this exchange also reflects incredibly poorly on the complainer in this case.
I completely disagree. The restaurant owner has no right to overcharge, and the customer - Harvard professor or minimum wage worker - has every right to be compensated for the business' dishonesty.