Deep Thought: When shops post a sign that says, “Guide dogs only”, who is supposed to read it? The dog?

The are a lot of things that businesses do that I don’t understand. For instance, we had lunch yesterday at a pretty well known restaurant in Jenson Beach called Conchy Joe’s. I have had lunch there before and dinner at the one in Melbourne and have had pretty enjoyable experiences. Instead of having normal lunch entrees, we ordered things to share like fish fingers, conch fritters, gator bits, etc. Well, the fish comes and Harbor takes a bite and his face goes white. Right away, my powers of deductions kick in and I deduce that the fish is bad. One whiff confirms that they must have accidently cooked the bait that was sitting in the bucket on the back porch. 

   Now everything we are eating becomes extremely suspect. So we tell the waitress and she confirms that it is bad and says she will take it off the bill. I ask, can we have some more conch fritters instead. Later when we get the bill, she of course has taken off the fish but went ahead and charged us for more conch fritters. 

Here is my thoughts on this; as far as the bill is concerned everything is even. She took the fish off and charged us for the fritters. What we paid for is what we ate. As far as our experience went though, it was far from even. Why would the manager not make up for the fact that we now have had a negative experience at the restaurant. What could they have done to make the experience positive instead of negative? They could have comped the fritters, bought a round of drinks or even given a gift card for dinner at a future date. But not doing anything, caused us to leave with a negative experience meaning we will probably never be back again. 

   The question I have for me and all four people who read this blog is how many times as a church has this happened at Shoreline? Somebody has a negative experience and for whatever reason, we don’t recognize it or we don’t care, they never come back. Or even worse, never go to any church again. 

Too many times, churches do things that make no sense, equivalent to putting a sign up that says “Guide dogs only” and create a negative experience.

That, my friends, is like eating stinky fish.  

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Pastor Eric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.