"Hey, you stuff too much in your bowl!"

One time I went to the Westfield Santa Anita mall with my girlfriend and ate at the food court there because we were so hungry and couldn't wait till going back to the Monterey Park area.

We decided to ate at Great Khan's Mongolian Festival since it's pretty delicious and you can stuff as much meat and vegetable in the bowl and let the staff there cook them, I thought. As we were putting meat and veggie in the bowl, a staff there suddenly told us

"Hey, you stuff too much in your bowl!"

I was kind of confused since I thought that the patrons are free to take as much food as they like.

"We're just a small business, we can't survive if you put so much food in your bowl." (I don't remember the exact wording, but that was what he meant)

There were other patrons there and they saw the whole incident. My girlfriend was pretty mad and told him that he's so mean, which was agreed by another woman in the line behind us. Despite this, we didn't want to argue with that staff and just let the chefs there cook our food. That was one of the worst dinner I've ever had, not because of the food (the food was delicious), but because I was angry about how rude that staff treated us.

If you think about it, this whole incident was ridiculous. First of all, there was absolutely no sign saying that there's a limit of the amount of food you can put in your bowl. Even if there's such a limit, I expect them to politely tell us not to take too much food; after all, we're patrons, the ones who're paying, right?

I don't know whether that staff was just an employee or the boss of the store (since Great Khan's has a franchise program).

• If he was an employee, why the heck did he care how much food the patrons took? He got paid the same anyways. Alright, maybe he was a responsible employee. A responsible employee won't piss a customer off for something that's not the customer's fault (again, there was no sign saying that I could only put that much food in the bowl)

• If he was the boss, that's even more ridiculous. He yelled at us in front of other patrons. Whether he was right or wrong, do you think the patrons who saw this incident would want to go back again if they've other choices?
  

The funny thing was his claim of going out of business if I took too much. Honestly, I'm not that skillful and I can only put a few more pieces of meat and veggie compared to other patrons. How much did those few extra pieces of meat and veggie cost? Let's say $3 (their meal was like $7)? For 3 damn bucks, they decided to lose two customers forever, not to mention the other ones who never want to go back because they saw the incident. What kind of business brain did that boss have?

If you've been to Pizza Hut before, you should know that there's a salad meal for which you can take as much salad as you can in one trip. Some crazily skillful people can actually take this much

(Photo from start.com.my)

Do you think that Pizza Hut loses a lot of money because of these greedy patrons? I don't think so. Why?

• There's probably only a handful of people who can build such a salad tower.
• Patrons usually don't just order this salad meal; they order pizzas also (this is Pizza Hut man)
• Greedy people like me seeing such a photo will probably go try it myself (but can't get as much of course). This is a great marketing campaign a lot cheaper than doing ads on TV!

After we went home, we actually used the comment form on their website to complain about it. Sadly, we didn't receive any reply from them. (I seriously doubt if that comment form does anything after I click "Submit")

If you're reading this and is one of the management people of Great Khan's, please think about what I said (O___o )