Michael Winner's outspoken remarks about the North West makes for an interesting comment on how one man's struggle to stay at the top of the midden heap lead him to tactless personal remarks. Michael's comments, which presumably reflect his personal experience, call up some interesting questions about the role of the critics in a world where we can all blog, youtube, flickr and facebook our own personal experience.
Michael is not blessed with better insights, understanding or better cooking skills than the rest of us. And nowadays we all get to have an opinion of service and we all get to broadcast it using social networks. Regrettably for Michael that includes him as a critic.
In my experience and the experience of millions of customers in the North West is we enjoy fantastic produce cooked and served well by passionate committed people who understand food and their customers, the fact that an insurance salesman with a TV show to promote has a desire to put these people down with such tactless stupidity say more about him than it does about a region and its food. And that is my experience of his remarks, see what I did there.
Fortunately we live in an increasingly open source world where we can all use our critical faculties to praise or offer criticism of the service we receive. It will be interesting to see whether vitriol and bile are the way forward.
TripAdvisors is a bell weather for this I think. If the media trains the public that criticism and bile are the best ways to improve a system then a fundamental rethink is required.
In the mean time I think we should remember that 2% of customers cost more to service than they ever return to the business and as a result we should seek to stop doing business with them.
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