I threw myself against Will and sobbed against his shoulder. He hesitated for a couple of seconds before wrapping his arms around my back and hushing me—the anger leaking out of him just as quickly too.
“Geez,” he murmured against my hair while holding me tightly in a hug. “So dramatic.”
It was enough to get me to laugh, and then the tension was broken, melting the overwhelming anger, irritation, and frustration I’d been building up. And the same on his side. I wasn’t even sure we said all we wanted to say. It was just enough to be together, and Charlie was fine. And gosh, this was stupid.
So was my beef with his second location. I just needed to talk to him about it, figure out what was going on... before I decided to hate him and Lola forever. Why was my default setting with my brothers to act like a complete child? Why couldn’t I always be this mature and understanding? It would make our business partnership so much easier.
“We’ll talk about why you were with Jonah overnight later,” Will said patiently.
Ooooh, right. That was why.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him something truly scandalous involving orgies and drug mules and rival gangs. But even a made-up story as interesting as that one would be better than the truth—better than a shared bed and a lot of kissing and waking up wrapped in each other’s arms. Now that I knew Charlie was okay, I wasn’t sure returning to Durham was such a smart move after all.
thirteen
I pushed awayfrom him and brushed my cheeks dry. Ignoring his statement altogether, I asked, “So did the bar burn down too? Or what?”
He rolled his eyes and got down to business. “There was a series of complaints because you said Charlie could bartend, but toward the end of the night, he was in a lot of pain. And in a lot of denial. I guess Ada could see he was struggling and was doing her best to get him to take care of himself, but he wasn’t having it. Miles just let him do his thing because, well, because he’s Miles’s boss, and Miles didn’t want to get between Ada at her bossiest and Charlie at his most stubborn. Anyway, customers were not happy. And instead of cleaning up the mess and smoothing things over as we pay her to do, Ada escalated the situation with Charlie. I had to talk Miles down from trying to quit. And several bad reviews were left online yesterday.”
There it was... Will’s hot button. Bad reviews. He could not stomach them. No matter how hard he tried to be cool about them or ignore them or go to therapy over them, they were the thing that drove him the craziest.
Sometimes he pretended they didn’t bother him so much. But I knew the truth. They kept him up at night. And he was convinced they would be our downfall.
Meanwhile, I was the PR person and supposed to be the one who cared the most about them. But nobody could beat Will’s stress level in this.
Early on, if the bar even got something as low as a three-star rating, Will would troll the troll. Like literally get online and go to war with his words. I had to change the password at one point to keep him from making enemies all over the city.
Not that it stopped him. But people were less likely to put his name with the bar without the official “Craft” logo and moniker attached to it.
This far along, we hardly got bad reviews anymore. And dealing with one every couple of months was bad enough. But a couple—he’d said several, but there was no way I believed him. Not that many people left reviews for bars. Most people expected a certain level of shitty service. And the rest of the people drank enough that they didn’t care about the shitty service. Multiple bad reviews in one single night were enough to make him lose it.
I sucked in a fortifying breath and prepared for battle. “Okay, I’m sure they’re not that bad.”
He gave me a withering look. “Well, they certainly aren’t great.”
So we were back to fighting. Awesome. “Did someone offer them free drinks?”
“Eliza, I wasn’t there. How should I know what happened?”
Calling on my last dregs of patience, I took a step back. “That’s fine. But we didn’t hire idiots. Miles and Ada know what they’re doing.” I held a hand up. “Regardless of what happened, I’ll reach out to the reviewers and offer them gift cards or something. I’ll make nice. It will be fine.”
I loathed the pandering to the customer that had to happen in this day and age. With the power of the Internet at their fingertips and posted reviews engraved on the Internet in infamy, a disgruntled customer could easily tarnish anyone’s reputation. A few bad reviews in a row, and someone’s dream got flushed down the toilet through no fault of their own.
In almost any other job, you were allowed to have a bad day. Or to struggle while you found your footing. Not so in the food and beverage industry. It was be perfect, be the best, be the nicest, be the coolest, be the most accommodating ever all the fucking time. Or die.
And the customers you thought were loyal and would fight for you to the death? The ones who actually felt more like family than friends? They just moved on. Found a new favorite establishment. And maybe every once in a while, they would remember the good times and good drinks they’d had with you, but it was only sentiment and would barely last a minute.
The restaurant industry was brutal. And those who chose to work inside it, with its shitty pay, constant customer service pitfalls, and all the work it took just to bring people in the door... were a special brand of gritty.
But here was the thing about food service. Beyond accounting for human error in your own staff, you also had to account for the unrelenting, unacknowledged human error in the customer. And that was what got to me.
It was one thing for Ada to be having a bad day and mess up. She couldn’t, nor could any other person who worked at Craft, always be perfect. So fine, mistakes happened, and Will, Charlie, and I went out of our way to accommodate and turn those experiences around.
But there wasn’t anyway on this earth to convince the customer of their human error. Maybe they were having a bad day without a way to please them. We could have worn bunny costumes and stripped for them and brought them a basketful of adorable puppies, and they would still give us one star because we didn’t live up to their clouded expectations.
Or maybe we weren’t to their taste. Maybe they wanted a good old PBR and not a craft beer that tasted like peanut butter and jelly. That was fine. They were absolutely entitled to their own opinion. But we weren’t the problem. We just weren’t a good fit.
That didn’t mean we deserved one star.
