What Was Leo Laporte’s Alibi for Having a Crappy 100th Episode Party?

If you haven’t already heard, Ed Lau and the Root of All Evil, gave The Lab With Leo’s 100th Episode Party an enthusiastic thumbs down.  Clearly, someone needs to go on the show and do a Party 101 with him. However, Leo wasn’t all to blame.  John Chow criticized the venue, The Alibi Room, for being ill prepared for the extra bodies, screwing up orders, and making the food somewhat inedible.  Though I agree that the food was clearly not up to par with other restaurants (the burger WAS dry and the bun had too many….twigs…in it?), I do realize that they were slammed, but I wonder what their “Alibi” was for being unprepared?

When a TV show with viewers from all across Canada calls you up to book your place out, you should really have a few more bodies available to handle the load. It’s not like they were told the night of the party that a bunch of people were showing up.  Having been a manager in a retail chain I know that sometimes you get slammed, however in this case, it’s like being ill prepared for Boxing Day. You know that on December 26th of every year, full in advance, that you will be slammed.  You don’t know how slammed, but you will be.  However, you have an idea from last year how slammed you were, and if you’re smart, you’ll add at least another body to the payroll to deal with any unexpected situations that always arise.

Even if that raises your payroll a few dollars, you can easily make that up by giving the best service possible and maximizing on all your revenue opportunities (more drinks? Offer Desserts? The list goes on!).  Even the staff suffers because they will be forced to give poor service and they will earn fewer tips and they will wonder why they even bothered to come in.  Not good for morale…

 

The Alibi Room clearly failed to see the signs and fell flat on their face in front of a bunch of people that have never been there before, and may or may not return in the future. Luckily, the venue is really cool with its huge collection of movie scripts and a great selection of imported beer and local beers, like the one above known as “The Backhand of God”, a stout style beer that had a smooth and full body taste. I’m sure that with such a cool venue, they’ll have people stopping by just to see it.

I hope they learn from their mistakes and take the criticisms as an opportunity to improve. One thing that businesses should never do with criticism is throw it back at the customer or worst yet, insult the customer for giving it, even if there is no truth in what they are saying. You’ll never know when a poorly worded email sent to the WRONG customer may come back to haunt you.