I was in Vegas three weeks ago, at the Cosmopolitan. We had breakfast at Eggslut, located inside the hotel. Side note: if you are in Las Vegas, eat breakfast there. I’m not kidding. I had the Fairfax, with avocado, should you be curious.

Now, I’m not a customer service specialist but while waiting for my order I watched the crew at work. I counted nine employees behind a counter approximately thirty five feet long. One person on cash, one calling out names for pick up. The rest on preparation and cooking. And I couldn’t help thinking that if this were back home, there would be two maybe three employees; not keeping up and exasperating customers (through no fault of their own). They’d rush, leading to order errors and more customer dissatisfaction. The owner would lose patronage and eventually close. Here the clincher: it would be someone/something else’s fault. Suppliers’ costs, customer fickleness, no tax breaks. Whatever, whatever.

It’s not. It’s cutting service at one end and the overpriced attempt to gouge customers at the other. It’s not giving the product and service your price demands. It’s acting like you have the monopoly on something when you don’t and even if you did I’d forgo it, if only to spite you. I’d find someone else, somewhere. And believe me there is always someone, somewhere who has better understood the balance between price and quality.

Eggslut cost $46.68 for 3 people. It took fifteen minutes at most from getting in queue to starting to eat. The food was excellent, the service amazing and lady on pickup apologized for the wait. As if! They were serving people non stop. If you were to ask me if I’d fork out this kind of cash back home my answer would be: Can you give me what Eggslut did?

I’m not a marketer, but I am a customer. We know what we like.