One New York professor decided that a Starbucks employee asking if she wanted butter or cream cheese on her bagel was an outrage. According to a report in the New York Post,  Lynne Rosenthal ordered a toasted multigrain bagel — and became enraged when the barista followed up by asking, “Do you want butter or cheese?”

“I just wanted a multigrain bagel,” Rosenthal told The Post. “I refused to say ‘without butter or cheese.’ When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want.” She also has a long-standing tradition of refusing to use Starbucks terminology such as Grande or Venti when ordering. She’s quite the rebel, this one.

As well as refusing to answer a simple question about her preference, Rosenthal screamed at the barista and escalated the situation until the manager called the police. Police told her to leave or be arrested, according to Rosenthal.

My first thought on reading this was that she is an arrogant bi—, but never mind my first thought. My second thought was that she is just flat wrong.

First of all, most people do not want their bagel served dry. They want butter, cream cheese, jelly or something on it. Asking means the barista can give the customer exactly what they want.

Secondly, getting angry, screaming and calling an employee an a–h— (as she is reported to have done) for trying to serve you is simply obnoxious. Even if this were an upsell (“Do you want the combo?”) a simple, “No, thank you,” handles the situation, and does not result in the police being called to toss you from the premises.

Third, you do have to tell Burger King what you don’t want on your burger. If you order a burger, you do not get a plain patty. You get a patty on a sesame seed bun, topped with mustard, ketchup and pickles. Heck, they might even ask if you want cheese on it, or if you want fries. The nerve!

People complain about the quality of service in many businesses these days, and it is true that there are employees who do not give a whit about being helpful to customers. However, there are also customers who are rude, arrogant and just plain nasty to service employees.

“Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English,” said Rosenthal. But apparently she is not a stickler for accuracy, common courtesy or simple human decency.

Is the customer always right? Absolutely not. And certainly not if the customer is Lynne Rosenthal. She says she will never set foot in a Starbucks again. Good news for Starbucks, not so good news for Dunkin’ Donuts.

The four-star Le Bernardin restaurant in New York City has exacting standards for service. In fact, they have a list of 129 “sins” that staff are to avoid when serving customers.

Many of the these will be familiar to mystery shoppers, as they are the kinds of things we are asked to evaluate in our reports:

• Not acknowledging guests with eye contact and a smile within 30 seconds. First impressions count!
• Not thanking the guests as they leave. Last impression!
• Forks with bent tines.
• Chipped glassware.
• Burned-out lightbulbs.
• Lack of eye contact.
• Not refilling water or coffee.
• Soiled or ill-fitting uniforms.

In addition, the list of sins covers things such as:

• Needing to be center of attention. Give the ego a break!
• Carelessly placed items on the tables.
• Rattling pocket change.
• Having a visible reaction to the amount of the tip.
• No sense of humor.
• Addressing the woman as “the lady.” (Times are changing!)

The entire list of 129 can be found in the book, “On the Line,” by Eric Ripert, and in this online story.

Integrated Voice Response (IVR) is used by a lot of businesses, often as an add-on to their mystery shopping and other market research programs. Mystery shoppers have often wondered if IVR will put us out of business, but I do not believe it will. There is, however, something else on the horizon that causes me more concern.

IVR is nothing more than a customer satisfaction survey. It can provide useful information, but it will never be able to provide the details clients have come to expect from their mystery shopping reports.

Questions on the surveys typically measure the customer’s feelings about their visit. They might ask things such as, “Was the person who assisted you pleasant and polite?” Or, “Were you satisfied with the speed of service?”

This points up a major difference between mystery shopping and IVR: IVR surveys collect subjective customer opinions. Mystery shopping collects objective data. For example, while a mystery shopper report may include specific timings (e.g., the elapsed time between entering and being assisted, between ordering and receiving a food or beverage item, or for the check out process), customers participating in IVR might be asked if they their service was “prompt” or “timely.”

Can you imagine a customer trying to complete an IVR survey where they are asked how long it took (down to the second) to get their hamburger? Or the names of six employees who assisted them? It is hard enough for us, and we go in knowing that we will have to provide that information in our reports. The customers were not warned there would be a quiz!

Although some businesses may try to replace mystery shopping with IVR, they will probably find themselves returning to mystery shopping to get the data IVR can not provide.

So if IVR is not a threat to mystery shopping, what might be? Some companies are starting to use a system that makes an audio recording of all customer interactions. The recordings are then uploaded to a computer that scans the recordings, looking for certain words and phrases or other patterns. The reports can then be given to the client to identify training issues, upselling opportunities and more.

Employees wear a recording device around their necks and everything gets recorded. Because customers are also recorded they must be notified, and this is done via a video screen on the device. With the notification, this is legal, but some customers may think of it as an invasion of privacy. We have grown accustomed to our telephone conversations with call centers being recorded, but talking to someone wearing a video screen telling us we are being recorded is not the same.

Because this captures all interactions, not just the random visits by mystery shoppers, there is much more data available. That could, in part, make up for the fact that even these recordings can not provide the kind of on-the-spot reporting a mystery shopper can. I do not seen this technology replacing mystery shopping, but as businesses add more technology to monitor customer interactions, there may be fewer budget dollars allocated to mystery shopping.

What do you think? Will mystery shopping become obsolete?

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip–Confessions of a Cynical Waiter, a new book by someone called “The Waiter,” (but since publication, identified as Steve Dublanica) tells the other side of the story: what happens behind the scenes at a restaurant and what waiters really think of the customers.

“Waiter Rant” is often wickedly funny, such as in the descriptions of the various types of tippers, or the 40 tips on how to be a good customer. Those tips include, “Do not snap your fingers to get the waiter’s attention. Remember, we have shears that cut through bone in the kitchen,” and “Never say, ‘I’m friends with the owner.’ Restaurant owners don’t have any friends.”

Some of the stories shared are touching or even sad, and others are a little scary. You will think twice before sending food back (especially multiple times) after reading this book.

Having a better understanding of the restaurant business can help us be better mystery shoppers, especially if you want to do fine dining shops. For example, did you know that asking for a different table can affect the service you receive? Restaurants try to balance the number of customers being handled by each server, and asking to sit at a table by the window or in a booth in the back instead of the table they had chosen for you can affect the timing of your service.

The guidelines for some restaurant mystery shops specify that you should not order off menu or request substitutions. These types of requests not only may affect the timing of your meal, the quality may also suffer. As Dublanica puts it, “In a restaurant kitchen, repetition is the key to consistency. You want your heart surgeon to have done ten thousand bypasses before he cracks open your chest, right? Same thing with a chef—if he makes the same entree ten thousand times a month, the odds are good that the dish will be a home run every time.”

“Waiter Rant” will also help you to learn more about ordering wine, tipping and other niceties involved in fine dining. It is an entertaining and engaging read, and it will help you to understand more about the fine dining experience from the other side of the table.

As shoppers, we are sometimes concerned that be required to ask what we believe are “stupid” questions will give us away. My answer to that is that real customers do dumber things than anything we do. Want proof? Check out this site: http://notalwaysright.com/.

At The Customer is Not Always Right, people who work in sales, tech support, food service and other customer service positions share horror stories of stupid and difficult customers. Anyone who has ever held a job dealing with the public will experience flashes of recognition. As secret shoppers, we have probably observed some of these types of interactions. However, if you see yourself as the customer in any of these stories . . . uh, there may be a problem.