You may have noticed a lot of my blogs lately are whinges about service. I notice I’m turning into a Grumpy Old Man. This is interesting because I made a positive decision to be more demanding when I got back from the USA and since then I’ve been exploring the nature of service, complaining, and lack of same in the UK. Last weekend I was chatting with a Frenchman and he thought it strange too how Brits do not complain: even given appalling food they will respond with a faux-joyeux “lovely, thanks” when pressed by the waiter.
I have a few half-baked notions for how it may have come about, but we are definitely stuck in a vicious cycle now: British customers don’t complain, so British staff don’t get used to dealing with complaints, so when customers DO complain, it doesn’t do any good. The cycle has to be broken somewhere, so I’m doing my bit and (a) trying to take criticism positively, and (b) trying to be more demanding / assertive / critical.
I just need to work on directing these criticisms where they can be useful. For now, I vent these views here in the hope I can encourage a culture of constructive complaint and maybe, just maybe, get people to hope for - nay, demand - levels of service comparable to mainland Europe and the USA. If I were American I would be able to call it my Patriotic Duty.
This morning the spitfire was still playing silly buggers so I cycled into work. As I got up to speed I rediscovered the missing cable for changing the front gearset. No worries, thought I, I’m late for work anyway so I’ll drop in Cycle Heaven en route and pick up a replacement to fit tonight. They open at 11:30 on Tuesdays! Bizarre.
My experience of Cycle heaven has been “not appalling”… But they refused to clean the chain as part of a service (though replaced a tyre unbidden which brought the fee up to £32 or thereabouts), and they want £12 for a headstock spanner, which you can get for £7 in Halfords. The main reason I go to cycle heaven is that it’s near me.
I used to go to York cycle works until once when I was restoring my old bike I ordered two new wheels from them and when I got them home, the bearings were worse than the wheels I’d discarded. I took them back to the shop and explained about the rumble. The response was “yeah, they’re not very good, those wheels.”
WELL DON’T SELL ME THEM THEN!!
Anyhow. I later bought a cheap bike from Tony Boswell’s Cycles on Tang Hall Lane. A year after that I took it back for a service. He charged £8 (or maybe £12 it was a while ago) and it ran like new. So you can see it was a shock to the system to pay £32 for a service at Cycle Heaven.
Today I popped into Tony Boswell’s - he’s near to our new office - to pick up the gear cable. £3 with a couple of bits of metal for crimping on thrown in for free. THAT’s what I call service. Now to the point. I don’t expect Tony Boswell makes great profits, what with the amount of service you get and the amount he charges. So all we can do is boycott the pretentious, brand-conscious, lazy bike shops and patronise Tony at every opportunity.