Free food, drinks and live music at one of my favorite weekend haunts, the St. Lawrence Market, sounded too good to pass up. Today was their customer appreciation day and a friend gave us some tickets. Well, I’m not sure I felt appreciated.
The first clue should have been the lineup that went around the building an hour before the doors opened at 7pm. Security guards carefully scrutinized every ticket but considering it appeared that the entire City of Toronto was invited, I'm not sure why they bothered with tickets at all.
For those of you familiar with the St. Lawrence Market, imagine it on a Saturday. Usually it's packed to the point where you can hardly maneuver between the meat and cheese counters and though it is a perfectly charming place to be, you count the minutes until you can load your groceries into you car or cab and get the heck out of there. Now imagine there are 20 times as many people. That's what it was like today. All of this for a free meal that turned out to be a whole lot of communal fruit and cheese platters.
To me there is nothing grosser than a bowl of free for all where every grubby hand in the joint can reach in and spread their special brand of bacteria onto innocent strawberries and cheese cubes.
To be fair there were a couple of meatballs with toothpicks sticking out of them so those were more sanitary - except they were all pork, which isn't exactly a universal favorite. We stood in several lines and I found myself feeling like a commuter on a crowded subway car, looking at the ground waiting for my stop as I plodded ahead like a zombie for my free cheese cube or meatball on a toothpick.
There were some performances, which was kind of neat, and I think the idea in theory was a good one. But in the future, S.L.M people, I'd feel a lot more appreciated if you would offer a 15% discount over the weekend or something rather than stuffing several thousand of your customers into a room to stand in 20 different lineups for one bite at a time.
But what do I know - I'm not the marketing genius.
The first clue should have been the lineup that went around the building an hour before the doors opened at 7pm. Security guards carefully scrutinized every ticket but considering it appeared that the entire City of Toronto was invited, I'm not sure why they bothered with tickets at all.
For those of you familiar with the St. Lawrence Market, imagine it on a Saturday. Usually it's packed to the point where you can hardly maneuver between the meat and cheese counters and though it is a perfectly charming place to be, you count the minutes until you can load your groceries into you car or cab and get the heck out of there. Now imagine there are 20 times as many people. That's what it was like today. All of this for a free meal that turned out to be a whole lot of communal fruit and cheese platters.
To me there is nothing grosser than a bowl of free for all where every grubby hand in the joint can reach in and spread their special brand of bacteria onto innocent strawberries and cheese cubes.
To be fair there were a couple of meatballs with toothpicks sticking out of them so those were more sanitary - except they were all pork, which isn't exactly a universal favorite. We stood in several lines and I found myself feeling like a commuter on a crowded subway car, looking at the ground waiting for my stop as I plodded ahead like a zombie for my free cheese cube or meatball on a toothpick.
There were some performances, which was kind of neat, and I think the idea in theory was a good one. But in the future, S.L.M people, I'd feel a lot more appreciated if you would offer a 15% discount over the weekend or something rather than stuffing several thousand of your customers into a room to stand in 20 different lineups for one bite at a time.
But what do I know - I'm not the marketing genius.
1 comment:
that's pretty funny, I'm sure I would have felt extremely appreciated too.
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