It was the perfect day to order a steaming cup of chocolate drink. After lunch on a rainy, cold Monday in January, my family and I decided to drop by a coffee shop. Glad to finally get in from the rain, we excitedly ordered hot chocolate, imagining sipping slowly the dark brown liquid, foamy and rich, with maybe a topping of marshmallows or cream with a swirl of chocolate syrup.
To our great disappointment, our cups were served, not steaming at all...worse, the whitish creamy liquid looked and tasted more like milk laced with what seemed like chocolate. They had to be taken back. But we were served with basically the same look and taste the second time! By then, our hopes of ever savoring hot chocolate on that cold January afternoon were foiled! "But this is how we make our hot choco: fresh milk with two teaspoons of chocolate powder!" the store manager explained. No matter. Their recipe for the drink would in no way ever create even just a shadow of what it ought to look and taste like.
The consolation to it all was that the manager did not argue with us or insisted on some store policy that would have turned us off all the more, We were offered another item as compensation for the disappointing service. Not bad as a compensatory act.
But hotchocogate was not about us being demanding and difficult. We were neither. It was simply a matter of how the proprietors of the store failed to create a concoction whose simple and common recipe could be modified but whose basic taste must be retained.
A lot of times, establishments forget that their customers have perceptions and expectations which must either be met at the least, or exceeded.
Deliver what you promise!
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