Would you eat this?
If you ordered pizza and received this barely lukewarm, sloppily made, sorry excuse for a pie in a trampled box, what would you do? In the last six months, the service at The Upper Crust in Brookline has plummeted. While the service has been on the decline, the level of incompetence and contempt for their patrons has increased.
After an unacceptable amount of consecutive bad experiences I decided to email the general manager, Patrick Joyce. He responded by calling me the next day. He was horrified by the experiences I had. He generally seemed concerned and wanted to make it up to me. He even went as far to give me his cell phone number in case I had another bad experience.
Well, just five days later, I placed an order for delivery and, instead of receiving a pizza, I got the saddest pizza you have ever seen. But it’s not that it was just a botched order. It was intentionally tampered with and questionable to eat. It was so sad that my roommates wouldn’t even eat it.
Now, before you say I’m overreacting, read the emails that I sent to Patrick Joyce. They’ll set up the scene a little bit better.
FROM: Ryan Saucier
SUBJECT: What kind of establishment are you running?
DATE: Wednesday, July 25, 2007
TO: Patrick JoyceMr. Joyce,
I believe The Upper Crust has the best pizza in Boston, but I’m curious to know how a company that treats its customers so poorly can stay in business. I patronize the Brookline location at least once a week. And at least once I week I am left with an utter feeling of having been patronized by your employees. (Funny how that word works both ways.)
Usually I opt for delivery but The Upper Crust in Brookline has taken the convenience out of that service. Unlike your hours of operation, delivery times are not posted on your website. It says that delivery is “available until 30 minutes prior to closing” but, contrary to what your website says, your hours of operation seem to vary depending on the alignment of planets in the solar system.
The following examples are not fabrications of over-exaggerations. They are actual experiences I have had when calling for delivery.
One Monday I called at 9:30 and was told that delivery stops at 9:00 on Mondays. The following Monday I called at 8:57 but was told that delivery stops at 8:30 on Mondays. I informed your associate that I was previously told that delivery stops at 9:00. His response, “Whoever told you that is ignorant,” was quite disconcerting. The next Monday I called at 8:30 but was told that delivery had already stopped because the drivers were all out on deliveries and weren’t coming back. I assumed there was a mutiny but was assured otherwise.
On a random Thursday night I called around 9:30 to inquire about the daily policy and was told delivery stopped at 9:00 and that they were closing in a few minutes. I asked if I could order for pick-up and was told that I could but I would have to be there within five minutes. I didn’t realize pizza cooked so quickly. The following is by far my worst experience to date.
I went in to pick up my pizza and, just before I entered, a couple walked in before me. Some charming shaggy-haired kid who was working the register began yelling at them in the most insulting way. “We’re closed! WE’RE CLOSED! HELLO! WE’RE CLOSED!”
I believe he had to yell three times because the couple couldn’t fathom the idea that he was speaking to them. He was. They left after they got the point that they weren’t welcomed. I went up to the register to get my pizza and was greeted by the same demeaning yelling of, “HELLO! WE’RE CLOSED!” He was yelling so loudly that I had to yell over him just to relay the message that I was picking up an order. Once he settled down, he asked for my name. I informed him whomever took my order didn’t ask my name. He told me I was lying.
Now, My. Joyce, you must understand that I am a non-violent and extremely patient person, but there are two things I cannot tolerate: unnecessary rudeness and being called a liar. I was so annoyed that I wanted nothing more than to smack him over his head with a pizza pan. I didn’t of course. He continued to argue with me over the validity of my name and, much to his unapologetic chagrin, was proven wrong. My pizza had no name.
After that ordeal I sat and waited ten minutes. (It’s a good thing I rushed down there!) The same kid who had been yelling at everyone was going around wiping down the tables and counter. I’m not sure if he was annoyed with me or with his job in general, but he decided to “accidentally” spray me, not once, not twice, but thrice with cleaner as he cleaned around me. After the third time I asked him not to spray me. He responded with another friendly, “WE’RE CLOSED!”
Finally my pizza was ready and I was on my way. When I got home I opened the box to find a pizza concoction that I did not order. I called the store to inform them of the error. I never had the chance though because someone picked up the phone, screamed “We’re closed!” and hung up on me. Like I said, charming…
Unfortunately this was not an isolated experience. This is the kind of service that exists at your establishment, particularly in the evenings. I would detail every experience but I’m not up for writing an email longer than any academic paper I would write for school. I’m also sure that you are probably too busy to read said email so I shall briefly bullitize some other fantastic experiences:
• Four times I have been given an incorrect order.
• Two times I have only received partial orders.
• One time I received a pizza that wasn’t completely cooked (the cheese hadn’t melted nor had the crust browned.)
• And of course, my personal favorite, the one time I ordered a pizza and, after waiting nearly two hours, called to inquire only to be informed that they had no order for me. (Instead of addressing this error, I was practically called a liar. I also never got a pizza because, you guessed it, they were closed.)To sum it up, your associates don’t seem compassionate when (frequent) mistakes are made. They also seem to make up rules and hours of delivery/operation that convenience them. I’m in the service industry so I understand when you close, you close, but I also work for a place that maintains a consistent hours policy.
For me, this email is long overdo. I know The Upper Crust has the best intentions in mind. And I would like to reiterate the fact that I think you have the best pizza in Boston. But having the best and being the best are not the same thing. I think it’s time The Upper Crust adopted that mantra.
Sincerely,
Ryan SaucierFROM: Ryan Saucier
SUBJECT: What kind of establishment are you running?
DATE: Sunday, July 29, 2007
TO: Patrick JoycePatrick,
I know you asked me to call you personally if I had any more problems but after what happened to me tonight, I was too irate to call you. You were extremely helpful and genuinely concerned when we spoke the other night. If I had called you this evening, I would have just taken my frustration out on you. And you had nothing to do with what happened.
I ordered a pizza at 8:49 PM. The woman on the phone remembered me from last weekend when they forgot part of my order. I ordered a large, double pepperoni and extra cheese with light sauce. The driver was rude. He didn’t acknowledge me. He just shoved the box at me and walked away.
The pizza had no seasoning, very little cheese, and it was sloppily sauced. But the fact that the pizza wasn’t exactly what I ordered isn’t what pissed me off. What pissed me off was the state of the pizza itself. It didn’t look like a pizza. It looked like a bunch of slices thrown into a box. There was no symmetry to the pie. Slices were bent over one another, stacked on top of each other, and spread out all over the place. Sauce was everywhere. It was the sorriest looking pizza I have ever seen. It looked so bad that my two friends who were here refused to eat it. They had to order food from somewhere else. I unfortunately did eat it and let me just say it looked better than it tasted. It wasn’t even hot. It was lukewarm at best. It was absolutely disgusting.
Now I can understand accidents happen. I know boxes can get banged, dropped, flipped over, turned on their sides, ect. But after my complaint to you a mere five days ago, I can only assume this was an intentional “FUCK YOU!” in a box from The Upper Crust. Oh, there is no doubt in my mind or the minds of my friends who witnessed what happened tonight. This was intentionally and maliciously done by someone at The Upper Crust in retaliation for my complaint. There is no way to convince me otherwise. A messed up order would be an understandable coincidence. This is just pathetic behavior from immature people.
I understand my original email was severe but, as I told you on the phone, it was a long time coming. I wouldn’t take the time to write such a long email if it had just been one or two incidents. What happened tonight confirmed my suspicions about your employees. They don’t care about your customers.
I am done with The Upper Crust forever. There is nothing you or anyone can do to make me order from you guys again. I wouldn’t trust anyone at The Upper Crust to make me any sort of food. I would just assume it to be tampered with like the pizza I got tonight. That’s exactly what I got tonight: A tampered, questionable, disgusting, and sorry excuse for a pizza.
This incident, paired with my previous complaints, raises some serious questions about The Upper Crust, the way you conduct business, and what you think of unsatisfied customers.
Sincerely,
Ryan Saucier
August 1st, 2007 at 4:40 pm
I think you ought to try to catch an incident on tape and/or film. according to your account of events, such happenings are ripe for the recording, and it would do such wonders for your cause.
personally, I’ve never had pizza from Upper Crust, so I’m not all too invested in your venture (I’m only concerned that my fellow man is having an uncomfortable time of it)…but were I to see a video of such blatant rudeness as you describe, happening in MY town, where I take no shit lightly, I don’t think I could help but feel involved and want to take action despite not having experienced it myself.
you know? there’s just no arguing with a camera’s account of things.
anyway, good luck.
August 1st, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I can’t say I have witnessed the customer service that you have, but before I saw this site, I had already vowed never to eat at the Upper Crust again. I work at a store which is/was frequented by one of the upper management of the Upper Crust. At one point, there was a dispute with this person over service fees (in which we were correct and he was clearly mistaken, for the record). Basically he refused to pay a fee that he owed us. We dealt with him, in my opinion, very politely, gave him ample opportunity to straighten things out with us, and he was nice to a point. When we finally put our foot down, however, he changed into another animal. Suddenly he started questioning the legality of our charge, and refused to pay, and started ranting and raving about how this is extortion, and that he runs a business, and that if this was how he ran his business, he would be out of business. He then paid what he owed us, and stormed off saying that he was going to right a letter to the local newspaper detailing how awful our service was and that he was also going to file a complaint with the better business bureau about us. At first we didn’t believe that he was who he said he was, based on his appearance in the store (he just didn’t look or act like a person who ran a business, and it was our mistake to assume that, but we never accused him of lying about it or anything), and a week later we saw an ad in a local magazine for the Upper Crust and his face was one of the five in the picture, so we got proof. At that point I vowed that if that was the mindset up the higher-ups at the Upper Crust, I wasn’t going to be a patron there anymore. Oh, and for the record, the aforementioned news article or better-business complaint never materialized.
My mother a few months later had another experience with this very same person which I will relay in less detail because I wasn’t personally involved in it, but suffice it to say that she works at an elementary school that was trying to reward its students for excellent performance in a fund raiser, and decided to give the students a pizza party. Someone had the idea to get the Upper Crust to donate the pizza, and this same person at Upper Crust from the last story thought it would be a great idea to have the students come in to the store and make their own pizzas and then eat them (which really is a great idea on the surface). Once this agreement was maid, however, my mother called the Upper Crust to confirm things, and the number of pizzas she needed, and the store seemed to have no idea what she was talking about, or they would tell her she could only have four pizzas instead of six, or that cost would change each time. When they finally went to the place to have the party, this same person dealt with them, and the experience was apparently substandard. Suffice it to say that it was to the point where the teachers of the classes that went to the party were furious that they were treated in such a manner, and they came down on my mother because she organized the event, but in reality the blame lay with this same Upper Crust higher-up that gave myself and the owner of the place I work such a hard time.
Long story short, no one in our family will ever be going to Upper Crust again, at least until they clean up their act and learn how to treat the people they interact with, even if they aren’t necessarily customers at the time.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Dear Sir,
I appreciate your creativity and passion. Have you taken writing classes?
But maybe you should revise your approach; taken by the numbers, I think things become more interesting.
You seem to be of College age,you use Livejournal. According to The City of Boston Public Relations department, you are one of approximately 240,000 students who live and learn here.
Entering both “Pizza,” and “Boston, MA,” into the Google Business search, a staggering 23,524 entries came back. But lets not be heavy-handed. Boston is a wide net to cast in search of dinner.
Doing the division, there is one restaurant for every 10 students. This being Summer, there are of course less students here. Fair enough. Perhaps now there are 3-5 students for every restaurant. And let us not even get into the general population. Concerning complaints, college kids will generate the most frustration by restaurant workers.
Narrowing the search to “restaurant pizza,” in the Brookline area, over 2,800 entries returned to me, with The Upper Crust lodging at third on the list, behind Aquitaine and Bertucci’s. Total time elapsed at this point is approximately two minutes.
I too live in Brookline and eat at The Upper Crust, so I called the store. I asked for a manager, but he was out, so I quizzed the girl who picked up. The first question I asked her was about complaints. How many had they received last week? How many complaints in an average week? Still a lowly peon in The Upper Crust hierarchy, the poor girl couldn’t say. She hadn’t a clue. But she did answer my next question.
According to her, on a busy day The Upper Crust will move on average 200-300 orders and probably half to two-thirds that many on a slow day.
When I account Monday – Wednesday as slow days when only 150 orders are taken and Thursday –Sunday as busy days when 250-300 orders are filled, every week The Upper Crust handles approximately 1,500-1,600 orders.
1,600 orders. Count them. Start at one, stop at 1,600. That is a lot of fucking pizza, without even counting the other locations in the franchise.
This is Summer, and as a former delivery driver elsewhere, I know that even without a seasonal college population, the slowest time of the year is when school is out. Business in my experience nearly doubles through September-October. I imagine Upper Crust sees even more dramatic increases, across all their locations.
My point is that no matter what time of the year, no matter when you call, no matter who you are or where you go, as an Upper Crust customer, you are a tiny fraction of their customer base. Churning out thousands of pizzas a month means there will mistakes. You are not extra-special. This isn’t Cheers. No one knows your name. Forget what you learned in Montessori kindergarten. Take your complaints to the manager all you want. Take your Boycott as far as you want, but I guarantee that you are fighting the wrong battle.
But good luck with the protest and everything. As I pointed out earlier, there are plenty of other places to eat. If you don’t like Upper Crust, go somewhere else.
But don’t be put off. There were plenty of worthy Boycotts in History.
1769: American Colonial society boycotts British goods; “no taxation without representation.”
1830: A Boycott of slave-produced goods by abolitionist Americans.
1921: Mahatma Gandhi boycotts British goods, institutions and rights of title.
1955: Among many others during the Civil Rights movement, the Montgomery Bus System is boycotted following an incident involving Rosa Parks celebrated by social leaders as the beginning of the end of accepted segregation practices.
And now, you.
2007: Ryan Saucier topples Boston pizza giant The Upper Crust in the face of less-than-exceptional service. You’re even a waiter. (Ryan is a waiter at Excelsior Restaurant, located at 272 Boylston St. Call 617-426-7878 to find out when Ryan works to talk to him yourself, or to find out what his managers think of him.)
Excelsior looks like a beautiful restaurant. And I bet you learned your snotty tactics from the patrons there who make your life hell.
Do you really want to be that guy?
I’m going to guess you don’t. You went to Emerson. You just want to make some noise and feel unique. But I don’t care, and neither does The Upper Crust. Go disappear. Eat somewhere else. You’re the problem here, not The Upper Crust. Leave them out of it.
Signed,
A Fellow Emerson Student
P.S. – For those interested, read this brief, awesome excerpt from National Public Radio’s longstanding series entitled “This I believe.”
“Be Cool to the Pizza Dude”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4651531
January 17th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
To “A fellow Emerson Student”- Your numbers are a little off sasquatch(Or should I call you Jordan Tobins or one of his friends? lol)
WMUR wrote an article a few months ago about how the world series was helping local businesses increase their sale tremendously. The manager of the Upper Crust was quoted as saying “We’ll have anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 in sales for the night for us”
At $20 for a large 2 topping pizza, that is between 50 to a 100 pizzas during a time that businesses were supposedly seeing their numbers double or triple. So needless to say, they probably sell on average about 50 pizzas on their busier days.
The pizza in that picture looks like shit. The kid didn’t like it. This is his blog- get over it. He’s entitled to bitch about whatever he wants. He’s stating facts from what I can tell- it doesnt appear to be dramatized at all. I know for a fact the idiots that work there are loud and obnoxious because I used to work next door to one of their locations and constantly had to listen to the bastards make animal noises and talk to eachother at the top of their lungs.
Apparently one of their landlords, Talanian Real Estate, was not happy with the peeon pizzeria and threatened to evict them for running their business in a manner that was pissing off all the neighbors. In that case, they deserved having that thrown in their face. The OP of this blog, however, did not deserve the treatment he received.
Feel free to have another one of your friends write an overly lengthy response Tobins- its amusing that you think that people believe that some random person would write “pro- Upper Crust” posts like the one above. You’re just a pizza place- there’s nothing about the Upper Crust that would compel someone to write such a drawn out detailed message like that.
Spend your time and money improving your restaurant and you wouldnt have to constantly police websites to cover your ass
xoxo