Originally Posted by ashley1234:
“RUBBISH, wizzard, you obviously havent been to a Little Chef for a very long time. They have an extensive menu & you don't need to have anything greasy unless you want to. I suggest you pay a visit before you make such comments.”
I haven't been in one for ten years admitedly but my dad went in one last week near Chester. Said it was just awful and the place was filthy and the toilets looked like they hadn't been cleaned in years. He said the place looked like it hadn't been touched since the 80's and the furniture was old and showed signs of years of wear. This echoes my experience too. I know they've tried to update their menus but adding a cesar salad and jacket potato doesn't constitute a great menu and to be honest the state of some of the people who work in these places, most of whom seemed to have lost (or never even had)the will to live, I wouldn't trust to boil an egg. I know someone who works for them who has exactly the same futile attitude. They're only there for the money. They have no official job training. Basically they learn what they have to do off the people already working there so if one person has developed bad habits or a poor attitude to work, they just pass it on to the next person and the decay spreads like a bag of rotten apples.
Everything is still an extortionate ripoff and the places are so drab and depressing and yes I did watch the programme with Heston so I know exactly what kind of mess the company is in. The state of most their outlets is disgusting so i'm NOT talking rubbish. If these places are so good how come everybody is saying the same thing and how come the company is on the verge of closure and how come they've closed about 50 of their outlets in the last few years most of which are boarded up with metal shutters looking like a complete eyesore? The chain is outdated, the places are so run down it would cost far too much to renovate them all and the whole company has a poor reputation which to be honest I don't think it will ever recover from because of so many others things.
You can give the place a face lift but they need to pay for those changes and that means more price increases. People are already reluctant to pay their ridiculous ripoff prices. The staff look like they're all being forced to work there under some kind of jobcentre back to work scheme. Talk about people with no ambition.
Little Chef is like Woolworths. Stuck in the past refusing to move with the times and update their outlets which are run by scruffy looking staff who can't be bothered. All the while everyone else moves on around them. In the end they just get left behind and no matter what you do it's very difficult to get customers back when a place has developed such a poor reputation.
It's sad but the chief executive is an idiot and his managers and directors are all nodding 'yes men' who from what I could see, just looked like a bunch of headless chickens who couldn't run a booze up in a brewery. While you've got idiots in charge at the top, the place will never change. When the head guy doesn't even know how to run his own company and has to call on a tv chef to help him out then how can the company ever survive?