For the last couple of weeks my mother and I have been making plans to meet our friends from church to watch the Altus Christmas Parade. The plan WAS for all of us to meet at Happy Donuts (which I still call Duncan Donuts since I use to work there) and hang out until the parade started then we’d all go outside and watch it together. But our plans for a happy gathering were soon crushed when the owner of Happy Donuts told us that he had people coming and that we could only stay for “20 minutes”! How rude!!!
I tried to explain to him that we had made plans to meet about 12-15 people there, depending on how many from the group actually showed up, but he didn’t care. He kept asking me, “Well what time are they going to get here?” as if I knew their schedules for the day. But we WERE going to order donuts and drinks, we WERE going to be paying customers but apparently this man cares more about the POTENTIAL of these so-called people showing up than he did about us, the customers who were already there and ready to pay!
And while this man may have owned Happy Donuts for several years now (I remember when Ralph sold it to him) he has obviously never grasped the concept of word-of-mouth. I am not now, nor have I ever been a business owner but if I did own a business I would NEVER treat paying customers in the way that this man treated us.
The old saying is “the customer is always right” and while some may finish that statement with “in theory only” they still put their customers first and treat them with the respect and dignity that they deserve. When a person decides to step into a place of business they deserve the salesman’s respect because they have chosen to spend their hard earned money to purchase the product that business is selling, it shouldn’t matter if that product is a restaurant or a retail store the same goes for all. And to be perfectly frank I don’t understand how Happy Donuts has remained open for all these years. Their service is not that good, except for the pleasant young man who works there, they’ve cut down the donut sections by at least half (from what I can remember) and I have personally, on two separate occasions, witnessed a pot of coffee sit on the burner for at least FIVE (5) HOURS that was still being served to customers because the owners are too cheap to brew a fresh pot of coffee for them! That should tell you what little regard they have for their customers!
Thankfully the day ended well with my friend and her son and me sitting in front of another business here in town and enjoying the parade together, mamma was of course in the truck not freezing with the rest of us. LOL
All in all, if you want to hang out with your friends for a few hours and have fun DO NOT go to Happy Donuts because they are not worth your time!
