Usually in any brand attack we “the public audience” are clearly aware of the one specific reason that sparked the attack. United Airlines guitar and Domino’s Pizza cases in 2009, Kevin Smith vs Southwest airlines in 2010, and in Egypt #VodaFly the Anti-Vodafone “Abbas Ibn Firnas Ad” campaign also in 2010, or the Left Bank valet case just last year (2014) just to name a few examples – however in this specific case I was confused.
Let’s go through this in detail and try to understand and analyze the case
The first time I noticed the case is when Ahmed Wasel posted this photo on his timeline Saturday 28th complaining about a Minimum charge of 150LE per person being enforced on them by the restaurant and above that over 400LE worth of items were added by the restaurant to sum up to a large invoice.
The total invoice amount is 1616.39LE
which leads to problem #1
(150LE x 15 = 2250LE not 1616LE), so I started to wonder if there was really any forced minimum charge?
Ahmed Wasel also mentioned that 400LE worth of extra items being added to the invoice, so if we take that into consideration and also remove the 12% service charge and 10% sales tax (which is added by law to every café or restaurant invoice)
1616.39 – 157.44 (service charge) – 146.95 (sales tax) = 1312LE – 400LE = 912LE
and this amount leads to problem #2
It is ordinary in Egypt to pay anywhere from 100 to 200LE per person when dining out at a similar restaurant and 912 / 15 persons = 60LE (and even 1616 / 15 = 107LE) which is low amount to pay and should be considered cheap – You can’t blame a Ferrari for being expensive if you don’t want to pay for it.
Reading down through the comments I notice Heba M. Jackoub trying to re-explain the case stating that the initial invoice was 800LE and the waiter informed them about the 150LE policy and just added 800LE worth of items (so is it 400LE or 800LE!!?) to sum up the amount to 1600LE
and here comes problem #3
If this is actually what happened then this is a pretty straight forward case! Just don’t pay, speak with the manager and/or report to the authorities or Consumer Protection – case closed, why all the fuss and noise? (Although in my personal opinion – how much should a person expect to pay in a Lebanese restaurant in City Stars? 107LE per person is normal if not cheap)…
Continue to the full article at Digital Boom here: http://adigitalboom.com/ayadina-restaurant-a-brand-attack-gone-wrong/