"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

Exactly.

I'm not sure why the Brazilian stall is being slated - it's the Greek stall that's displaying shit business decisions!

Not necessarily an inconsequential detail. It could easily indicate a made up story...getting details mixed up/changing based on people's reply....
Anywhoo, Greek place were BU, Brazilian place was fully in their right to give out free cutlery.

Clearly, I’m BU to expect niceties.

If you were in a long queue to buy food, would you want the stallholder to be taking the time to have a nice chat with every one of the customers ahead of you?!

They're pretty much like a fast food drive-through - it's just dealing with customers as efficiently as possible, which means, sadly, that it isn't the place for a friendly chat.

Greek stall totally in the wrong. Why should the other stall subsidise them! People saying it’s only a fork don’t have to pay for it. Costs have risen massively, if this happens regularly why should they bear the cost. The Greek stall is still
selling food knowing they don’t have cutlery. It’s down to them to sort their business out.

Of course they don't owe an explanation but it's free to give an explanation in this case and creates good will which is of value. Bad business to do otherwise.

Lunch at 8.30pm?

I have a business myself and I know the need to make a profit. Acutely!

But a fork costing 0.00019 isn’t going to break the bank.

Sometimes ‘being nice’ can make a huge difference in how customers perceive your business and consequently how much custom you get. Not all customers are out to ‘take a mile’ either! Perhaps it depends on your clientele and the service you offer, as well as your own attitude.

What I do know is that if you go through life expecting that everyone wants to ‘take a mile’ and having the attitude that you’re never going to ‘give an inch’ that will tend to lead to certain outcomes and may limit your experience of life. Depends what you want and how you want to be, I guess.

Exactly!

Honestly, you learned not to give a goodwill vibe to people in hospitality. They will totally use that against you.

The greek stall is in fault, the brazilian just either had enough or just didn't care. Either way, they are not in wrong.

So you would be fine with other business sending people to get bags for their good from you without previous agreement?
(Because that is why the Brazilian stall was most likely not being "helpful". Wouldn't you eventually also run out into issues with limited atorage space stall have?
It's noce to be nice in theory

We’re in the realms of the standard MN projection, imagined scenarios and black and white thinking, aren’t we?

Clearly, if the stall holder has a long chat with every customer that is an issue. But we’re not talking about this, are we? What proportion of customers in a queue are just asking for cutlery and need that explanation? 5%? In which case a 30 second explanation would be fine, really, wouldn’t it.

And if they’re anything like the stall holders I’ve seen they’d be chatting while they were serving, not stopping

I would be fine with it if it was a one-off. If they did it on multiple days I wouldn’t be, but I’d be explaining to those who asked why.

I agree the Greek food stall holder was in the wrong. But the Brazilian food seller could have handled it a lot better.

Okay - so by that logic, why shouldn't the Greek stall "be nice" and explain the lack of cutlery beforehand, then? Instead of taking £20 of people's money and then telling them "oh, sorry, we have no cutlery so you can't actually eat what you've paid for".

Why is it down the Brazilian stall to explain their policy to a non-paying customer just because another business can't be bothered to organise themselves properly?

For the Brazilian stall, it's not about the price of a fork, it's the principle.

But it's not their issue to handle.

So we’re back to the not wanting to help out unless there’s something in it for them.

Which we clearly don’t agree on. You think that’s fine, I don’t like that sort of attitude. I think it leads to a lot of problems generally in society.

I strongly suspect this is not the first time greeks had issue because in all my experience stall holders usually help each other.
Don't have cutlery? Yeah, take the pack over there, you can return it later today. Oh. Another? Are you going to ahop soon? Oh. Another thing. Oh yeah, can't...
There is always 1

I am now thinking if this was written by greeks trying to take down brazillians or by brazillians trying to take down the greeks or if there is a shawarma shop next to them trying to take down both😂

The Greek stall should be more organised, or have the decency to "be nice" and sort the cutlery issue themselves, not send their customers over to beg for cutlery from someone else.

And it's not about helping out unless there's something in it for them, it's about not being taken advantage of.

The Brazilian stall missed a trick. They should have accepted your offer to buy a drink and throw in a fork. If they did that every time a Greek food customer needed a fork, they would be making a nice little profit.

Tbf, I was in Manchester a few weeks back. Food literally everywhere was really poor, service was poor everything was poor tbh. Even 5* hotel breakfast was a bit meh. Wasn’t there a premier league football player who wanted to leave because their wife said the food was rubbish. I thought she was being picky, but she clearly wasn’t.

I'm not surprised by this, they’re clueless when it comes to service or anything tbh.

I live in Manchester and you op has just given me another reason not to go to the Christmas markets , overpriced tat and the fact they wouldn’t even sell you a fork unless you spent £10 . Don’t bother in future they are rubbish money grabbers .

When I ran a burger trailer we used to get requests from non-customers for free hot water every day we traded, when we said it would cost them the price of a cup of tea they would get really arsey as it was "only" water, sometimes they would offer to pay us 10p to cover the cost of the cup. I literally didn't have time to explain that we had to bring all our water with us so we were limited as to how much we could carry (due to space restrictions inside the trailer and the weight our car could tow), it took ages to heat up in the urn which cost a considerable amount in calor gas, so therefore even if they paid us for a paper cup it wouldn't make up for the time and logistics it took to get the water boiled and also us risk losing sales if we ran out of water later, which did happen sometimes on a busy day. I;m sure someone will say we lost the chance that these people would ever buy from us again but we were plenty busy enough anyway and you get a good nose for who might actually spend money with you at some point and who just wants something for free.

I imagine the Brazilian stall had similar issues in that they're not just giving away/charging a nominal sum for cutlery, they're potentially losing the profit from full meal(s) costing £10+ if they run out of cutlery themselves later on because they've been supplying two stalls instead of one. As a PP said it's not like they're losing any goodwill as it's unlikely the same customers will eat at the same Christmas market stall two days in a row.

"Sorry we will don't have enough of these to give them out without food" would have sufficed, been quicker, and not allowed other customers to see their poor customer service skills!

Amazing Brazil stall couldn't offer a one sentence explanation but MN has gone into it into depth!