"You can't have it for free",aibu?

[imacccu]

So I'm at Manchester for the Christmas markets.
Spent £20 on a Greek sharing box to eat for lunch.
I ask for two forks and she tells me they've ran out and to get them from the Brazilian stand opposite.
So off I go and say "can I have two of the plastic forks please as the Greek stand have ran out"

She says "no I'm not allowed as you didn't buy food here,you can't expect them for free"
I said okay il buy a drink
She said no only food
The cheapest thing was £10
So I sad no
Aibu to think she could of gave me a plastic fork
Is this what the worlds came too?
She had a huge and I mean huge tub of cutlery

So we had to eat with our hands which was near impossible as it was coated in sauces etc

No they arnt a charity why would they

The Greek place should have gone to the other stall on your behalf and borrowed some cutlery until the next day

Stupid of them not to either sell you a couple of forks for 10p, send you back to the greek stall to say they can have 20 for £1 (or something) or just sell you an overpriced drink and give you the forks. You obviously were not going to buy another meal just to get a fork and you are not likely to but their food or drink another time.

You were not being unreasonable as you offered to buy something well in excess of the cost of the forks.

The Greek stall are at fault.

The Brazillian stall doesn't owe you anything.

Because it’s never just 1 person. It’ll be a 100 people if there’s lots of footfall.

But it's NEVER 100 either, is it? Let's be honest.

I'm a self-employed small trader (not catering) and I give away freebies sometimes, it's good for business as it creates goodwill. When people perceive you as stingy and mean they're not so keen to do business with you. It's off-putting.

I've noticed that mean, tight people never want to be recognised as mean. To them, they're always 'careful'. They put their focus on how outrageous those people are who like a bit of give and take, rather than recognise they're stingy.

And no give and take with the other traders? Odd.

And OP offered to pay for the cutlery or buy a hugely marked-up drink. She'd have paid for the cutlery over and over. They were given an opportunity to help and decided not to. Not nice. Mean.

Both stalls ABU
Greek for not having cutlery, Brazil for a shoddy business decision to not include cheap cutlery with overpriced drink.
I would have asked for a refund from the Greek then gone to Italian.

I'm quite surprised by the strength of opinion on here, as MN is generally not in favour of enabling or capitulating to CFs. I'm not saying that OP is the CF, but note how the Greek stall left OP (and probably dozens of other customers) to go and ask and didn't go themselves.

The Greek place could just as easily have gone to Morrisons and bought some bags of disposable cutlery for their customers, but they obviously felt too important/greedy to do that.

Why should the Brazilian place be expected to run - and budget for - their business AND somebody else's as well? It's not even like it's difficult to plan how many you need - as it might be if it were fresh food that could go off and go to waste - you just buy a massive box (as the Brazilian place sensibly had) and you're sorted for ages.

Or OP could have brought her own cups with her, or bought her second child a drink for themselves?

Businesses exist to make a profit - yes, one cup may only cost 10p which is no big deal, but it's never just one.

Look, I did say upthread that the Brazilian stall was silly for not taking the £3 for the drink and cutlery.

They will have absolutely known it was a good deal for them, so the reason they said no was less to do with being mean to OP and more to do with sending a message to the Greek stall for taking the piss and sending customers to them for cutlery.

And I have just said upthread that the cafe should have given another post a cup for free.

But it was just the one cup for that poster. She wasn’t going to turn up and demand 100 cups. And she would have paid the 10p.

And no give and take with the other traders? Odd.

But we don't know if there was general give and take or if the Greek place take all the time and never, ever give. Besides, it's not give and take among traders if you send all your customers to ask and don't go over yourself to ask if you can borrow however many, promising to replace them the next day (or sooner, considering Morrison's was on the doorstep, and they sell big bags of disposable cutlery that works out at about 5p each).

You might think it's not breaking the back but how many people have they sent over? And they need their own forks for their own customers. Why should they give them away?

Sounds like we might actually be broadly in agreement!

If the scenario was how you imagined and they wanted to send a message to the Greek place (who I agree shouldn’t have sold the food without warning there was no cutlery), then I can’t fathom why they didn’t explain this to OP with a smile ‘oh, we’d love to, but you must be about the hundredth person today who’s asked us. We’ll run out of cutlery for our own customers if we keep doing it. I’m so sorry’. Wouldn’t have hurt, would it?

But you're not the only people who will have been asking. What if they'd been out of forks all day and you were the 200th person to ask.
It costs them money and she wasn't BU.

The Greek stall are CF's. You should have got the money back for your food and spent it elsewhere.

But businesses need to look at the bigger picture.

If their policy is to just give out free cups to anyone who asks, they'll need to raise their prices accordingly. Even if they charge 10p per cup, they'll need to buy more cups so that people who are buying drinks don't end up with no cups as they've all been given away.

Is it nice to give out free cups? Absolutely, but nice doesn't pay the bills.

Both stall holders were twats.
I would have gone back to the first one and asked for a refund.

The Greek stall you bought food from are at fault for not having enough cutlery.

That said I don’t think it would’ve killed the Brazilian stall to have given you a fork.

The cheapest box of 100 plastic disposable forks on Amazon are £1.99. That’s 0.0199p per fork. She really wouldn’t have been out out of she’d bough a pack of cheap forks and and she can sell them at 10p each and make a good profit. She was being ridiculous (especially as you said you would buy a drink which is way more than the cost of 1 plastic fork).

Because you gove freebees. I am in hospitality, also traded on markets and the only way we would be giving free anything but samples would be if it were our customers or the other stall would actually be decent enough to speak to us first.

It can easily be hundred within few hours on busy Christmas market. How do you think the extortionate rent is made. You know that.

It's offputting to expect other business give out stock, even if cheap, due to your own failure to stock properly

I agree they shouldn’t give out free or 10p cups to all and sundry, but that poster had just bought a coffee and bottle of water from them. Giving a cup for her other dc (for free or at cost price) would have been nice thing to do.

I agree with this. Surely the Greek stall could have sent a member of staff out to buy some plastic cutlery, either from the Brazilian stall or from a general shop.

But it was a bit mean not to charge you (say) 50p for a couple of forks. (And a bit cheeky of the Greek place to send you there).