Coffee Shop Owner's New Pricing Policy Goes Viral For Teaching Manners To Rude Customers

Aug 15, 2018 by apost team

A business owner tried to put kindness and courtesy back into business interactions. This is what he did to his pricing grid to make that happen.

It seems like manners have diminished over the years, especially in the context of a consumer-business relationship. Many customers are rude not only to the employees but also to the actual business owners. They have this sense that the customer is always right even if they act like complete jerks. Things like common courtesy and manners are often unseen in such situations. A Roanoke Virginia business owner put the manors back into business transactions. He used a strategy based on how the customers addressed the cashiers and servers.

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We'll discuss his coffee pricing as an example. His new sign displayed the cost of a coffee as $5. So, if the customer walked up to the person and simply said, "Small coffee," they would need to pay $5 for that small coffee. The price of a "Small coffee, please" went down to $3.

In other words, a nice please with their request for a small coffee would drop the price by $2. The coffee only cost $1.75 if the person said, "Hello. One small coffee, please." So you can see that the approaches that showed the most manners got the largest discounts.

The new strategy did not fail. It worked quite well. Many of the customers came in and used their manners. It's a good thing even if they were doing it to get discounted coffee. The more you do something, the more accustomed to it you become. So, this little strategy that the business owner used could actually end up causing many people to be more courteous all the time.

The sign that he put out about the coffee ended up going viral.

People took pictures of it and posted it on social media sites almost immediately. He wasn't the only person in the world who felt like the world was lacking kindness in a big way.

When someone asked the store owner to give a comment on his strategy, he said he decided to resolve the injustices of the world by starting with the small stuff. He wanted to start by charging people more when they didn't take the time to greet other people and connect as human beings. We can probably look forward to this store owner doing more things to encourage people to use manners, courtesy and kindness

Tell your neighbors about this story, and don't forget to say please and thank you when you order coffee.