In an article about their famous restaurant surveys, Nina and Tim Zagat write
Over the years that we’ve spent surveying hundreds of thousands of diners, one fact becomes clear: Service is *the* weak link in the restaurant industry. How do we know? Roughly 70% of all complaints we receive relate to service. Collectively, complaints about food prices, noise, crowding, smoking, and even parking make up only 30%. Moreover, the average rating for food on our 30-point scale is usually two points higher than the average rating for service. Given the fact that identical people are voting, and that there are hundreds of thousands of them, this deficit is dramatic.
They go on to give some advice to the restaurant industry for improving service. But don’t these results say that in fact we don’t care about service? They show that we choose the restaurants with good food despite their bad service. Sure we complain about the service, other things equal who doesn’t want better service. But we can live with bad service if we get good food.
Cheap Talk 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 3, 2009 at 12:12 am
Monk
This smacks a little too much of the “everything is always in equilibrium” fallacy common in economics. The same argument could be made to justify almost any deficiency in business. I don’t find it hard to believe at all that owners of some businesses may not be able to identify their industry’s main weaknesses. Interesting quote, though.
June 3, 2009 at 2:10 pm
jeff
You don’t need to assume that everything is in equilibrium to interpret the data the way I did. There are certainly lots of restaurants with good service and bad food. Zagat is surveying a large group of restaurant-goers about the restaurants they choose and we are finding that many of them are going to restaurants with good food and bad service.
Bad service is sometimes a quaint defect of a good restaurant. “Don’t expect good service, but the food is great.” “The soup nazi.”
But threre is no such thing as a good restaurant that serves bad food.
June 3, 2009 at 10:14 am
Lawrence M
I certainly leave bad tips or I just leave a note on the receipt explaining why I’m not leaving a tip. Many people feel obligated to tip servers b/c their tips are their wages. Well I think of it as working based on commission. If a salesman doesn’t make a sale, how often does he get paid?
June 3, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Daniel C
Perhaps it is easier for restaurants to produce consistently good food than it is to provide consistently good service?