80/20 Rule

Lloyd and I put together a fish and chips stand.

This weekend, our neighbor organized a block-long yard sale. We set up under a tree and soon people queued up for astonishingly delicious deep fried striped bass and potatoes.

The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers, and that you'll never please the bottom 20% of your customers.

I'd say it was more like the 95/5 rule, but we did have one woman who was so annoying I finally told her off. She wanted bigger fillets. So for her second order I gave her the biggest fish chunks we had, fresh out of the wok. She insisted over and over that she wanted more fish on her first plate as well.

"Ma'am, this costs two dollars. Two dollars. You can barely get an order of fries at McDonalds for that," I snapped. She took her plates and wandered away, grumbling.

We hardly "netted" the cost of supplies, and if you count the labor, we actually came out behind. That was not the point of the exercise; it was to have fun being neighborly and show off Lloyd's tremendous catch (120 pounds) and his 60,000 BTU camp stove.

The customer is not always right. Two dollars a plate was a steal and still this woman wanted more. I bet fast-food workers around the world only wish they could tell off their unreasonable customers the way I did.

PS The food processor does a better job than I ever could at slicing potatoes. Is it a coincidence that Americans started growing fatter at the same time that the Cuisinart arrived at US department stores?