“Screaming” Group Of Customers Demanded 5 Extra Bowls To Split $3.60 Hawker Dessert Order
When dining out, service goes both ways. While customers expect pleasant reception at an eatery, F&B owners also hope for cooperative diners. Sometimes things go awry, as netizen Lim Foo Choong found out. The 43-year-old owns a dessert hawker stall at Ang Mo Kio, where he hires his mother’s friend — whom he calls “auntie” — to run it.
He took to Facebook group Hawkers United yesterday (Mar 10) to highlight a disagreement between the stall auntie and a group of customers who asked for more bowls to split their desserts.
In the long post, Foo Choong started out by saying: “I wrote this post in response to an incident today met by [my hawker assistant]. It reflects on the difficulties [faced] by many hawkers every day.”
“Screaming” customers who wanted 5 extra bowls to split 2 desserts
Speaking to 8days.sg, Foo Choong declined to name his stall as he feared backlash from the customers involved. “I’m not sure what trouble this kind of people would make if they were exposed. My post was mainly to raise awareness to be more understanding of a hawker problem, I don’t want to shame anyone,” he said.
The group of diners patronised his stall yesterday, ordering two bowls of green bean soup and cheng tng that came up to a total of $3.60. “They were young, around 30-plus, and there were both men and women,” said Foo Choong.
The trouble started when one of the women in the group asked the stall auntie for an extra empty bowl. “My auntie passed it to her together with the order and [the customer] also helped herself to many disposable spoons,” Foo Choong wrote. “Later, another person from the same group came and asked for four more bowls, which we refused because we really have a limited [number of bowls] to go around for the day.”
The stall auntie then proposed that the customer buy disposable bowls at $0.20 each instead. According to Foo Choong, “what happened next was an ugly sight that involved screaming”.
Customer threatened to make his stall “famous”
He elaborated: “The whole group stood in front of the stall shaming my auntie and kept saying ‘没人这样做生意的!’ (Mandarin for ‘nobody does business like this’) for a good few minutes and demanded the number of the person-in-charge.”
He told 8days.sg that as the stall’s owner, he got a call later from one of the customers in the group, but was told a “twisted version of the incident” and also received a threat from the customer to make his stall “famous” on social media.
“She [said] my auntie refused to give her a bowl and ask for $0.20 for an empty bowl, but hid the fact that she had already received one bowl and had asked for more, so we couldn’t explain things to her,” said Foo Choong, who was not present when the incident happened. He later got the full story from his stall assistant.
Expectations for $1.80 dessert
In his Facebook post, he highlighted that his stall has “very limited space to store our bowls, spoons and we can only place two containers for the return of used bowls.” He added: “Due to space and other restrictions, the only feasible time for us to wash the bowls is after we close. If all the bowls are used for the day, we will need to give takeaway containers which will cut deeply into our profit as our average selling price is $1.80."
Foo Choong surmised that his customers had felt angry about being asked to pay for extra bowls. “I think they expected us to provide normal bowls. But when we said we didn’t have enough and they needed to pay [for containers], the lady blew up and her group joined her and started screaming at [my hawker assistant],” he said to 8days.sg.
He found out from the stall auntie that the group had “stood in front of the stall and tried to intimidate [her], and left after a few minutes after getting my phone number to make a complaint about how badly we run the stall and how could we expect customers to pay for empty bowls.”
Raising awareness about difficulties that hawkers face
In his post, a frustrated Foo Choong lamented: “The main reason for me writing this is really to explain the difficulties we face in operating as a hawker. Please when making requests for extra chopsticks, chilli, bowls, sauces, plates etc, please take what you need and request only what is reasonable… Please, for [an order costing] $3.60 and ask for five extra bowls means we need to wash seven bowls for $3.60. And all the bullying we may encounter when we refuse is really depressing. [Sad face emoji]”
It is a case of simple maths: Customers may think they are ‘only’ asking for five extra bowls, but for a hawker facing numerous similar requests every day, it all adds up.
Foo Choong shared with 8days.sg: “This request is not uncommon, but customers normally understand and can take no for an answer. They usually ask for one bowl, which we oblige, but five extra bowls for two bowls of dessert is a little too much.”
