A good reason to treat your server well.
Followed by a better one.
For some 20 years, suitors assailed the tiny bread, sandwich, and dessert shop Village Baker with franchising proposals.
I do mean tiny. The original shop in the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan has no seating. You order at the counter, wait, grab, and leave. This dissuades no one. Hungry customers, eager to spend, mob the place daily.
Who wouldn’t want a shot at franchising that?
Alas, none could catch the fancy of founder and owner Worth McCleery. Until, that is, the father-son team of Lee and David Boardman with partner Dow Jones* came along and struck a deal. Now there’s a second location,** this one boasting a dining room that has already proved too small, with more locations on the drawing board.
How on earth, envious would-be investors asked the elder Boardman, did you win over McCleery? Boardman didn’t know, so he asked.
Sure, McCleery said, the details of the proposal were in order. But the tipping point came during their lunch meeting at a nearby café, when McCleery observed the courtesy with which the Boardmans treated their server.
Most of us will never clinch a deal by being nice to a server, but that’s a lousy reason to treat people with dignity and respect, anyway. The fact that courtesy is typical of the Boardmans, and that McCleery responded to it, gives me a bit of hope for this species of ours.
Now scurry off to Sandy or West Jordan and stuff yourself silly.
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* That’s his real name.
** This one is in Sandy, also a suburb of Salt Lake, mercifully close to my office.