Frankenstein Franchisees

A franchisee of one of Bombay’s oldest chains, now in Aundh Pune, shocked our tastebuds. It achieved the feat of serving up a piece of chicken that seems to belong to 3 different birds – one old and tough, one frozen solid, and one in a state of decomposition. The first bite is tough and chewy, and you’re considering calling the waiter; but your hungry niece takes one bite and says the part she’s chewing into is quite tender, so you subside, thankful that you don’t have to yet again take panga. Meanwhile you try to rescue some French fries from the mud-slide of nameless sauce that they have got buried under. They feel slimey and soggy against your tongue, but you tell yourself to let it be. You make a jab at some green beans, thinking healthy thoughts, and what you get is uncooked and unstrung pharasbi.
Meanwhile, the restaurant is filling up with techies from next door, and they’re digging in and wolfing it down, without any complaint. So you decide you’re getting old and fussy, and heading far too early towards that place where you eat only food cooked by your own hands. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, so you determinedly soldier on with your ‘sizzler’. Your next bite you get a slightly tender piece, and are about to relax into your meal, when your niece puts her hand to her mouth and makes that involuntary gulp that you’ve seen her make 18 years ago when she was very little and got a teeny-tiny piece of malai in her milk. That’s not a good face, because you remember it usually ended in you trying to get the smell of vomit off a dhurrie. Vomit is a horrible word, that makes many people, well…vomit. So let’s go with ‘upchuck’ as one of our teachers used to delicately say. “Don’t eat too fast, or you may upchuck.”
Well, my niece’s eyes watered, and she did the scary pre-upchucking gag thing, but having grown up, she didn’t, thank god. She carefully, and I must say quite stylishly, removed the contents of her mouth into a paper napkin, and even managed to wipe the inside of her mouth with another napkin quite elegantly. Given that the restaurant in question is all glass fronted, and passersby have the pleasure of watching your every move as you eat, I’m rather glad for everyone around that she held it all together. “Smelly” is all that she managed to say to me.
By this time we had eaten about a third of the stringy beans, sodden fries and leathery floret of cauliflower that were masquerading as sautéed vegetables. So technically, we were well into our meal; we’d made inroads into that sizzler. It seemed so cheap to now call out to the manager and complain. And it was one of those days when neither of us were feeling like making a scene.
But somehow I couldn’t let it go. Memories of outstanding sizzlers eaten circa 1979 in Bombay at the mother joint came floating back, and a little upchuck of resentment built up inside my soul, and I called, first, the waiter. I decided to keep it soft, gentle and civilized, having used up my week’s supply of screechy, rough and uncouth on the MSEB guy just the day before.
“The chicken is a little…umm…perhaps not good,” I said, doing my gentlest best.
My niece looked doubtfully at me, obviously making a mental note in support of her theory that I am getting old and boringly mellow.
The waiter looked at our half eaten portion, and narrowed his eyes.
“It was ok in some parts,” I bleated, sheepishly.
At this point, he picked up a knife and tried to cut through the piece. (Obviously in this place, the customer is not always right, and her opinion has to be checked out under her nose.)
Luckily for us, the chicken piece behaved like one of those rubber-toys that you get for your dog, and kind of bounced around and refused to yield to the jab of his knife.
“Why don’t you also smell it,” my niece suggested coldly to him.
I hastily said “No, please don’t,” afraid there would surely be an upchucking incident now.
The waiter removed the plate and hurried inside, looking quite disturbed. Ahh, so he too realizes there is something wrong.
But instead of him emerging from the kitchen with a fresh piece or an apology or a suggestion that we have something else, out came a smooth-looking young man, the maitre d or whatever fancy name he goes by in such joints.
“Any problem madam?” this stripling asks.
“Yes, your chicken was old and smelly,” my niece says, seeing that I was in a mood to be polite and might have said something waffly like “Err, the chicken was a trifle…resilient…shall we say?”
Smooth Stripling simply smiled superiorly. He was in Pune, you see, and us Puneris obviously had never eaten a sizzler before, so he said kindly and helpfully: “Madam, that is barbecued, you see.”
I thought he would spell it out b-a-r-b-e-c-u-e for us.
This is when I said, re-gathering some of my usual irritability: “We barbecue meats too, you know. Your meat was just tough and awful.”
Smoothy just smiled some more as if I had complimented him in Swahili, and asked silkily: “Any desserts madam?”
No desserts for us boy, but you’ll get your just deserts soon, I hope, I wanted to say. But I didn’t.
Within 15 seconds, the bill arrived – we had been charged fully for the Carcass Sizzler.
I paid up and left, vowing never to go there again. But that’s a lame thought, given that the place is being swarmed by youngsters with better teeth, better stomachs, better appetites, and noses and tastebuds completely blunted by air-conditioning and pollution.
****
Franchisees of bigger-city restaurants, salad bars, supermarkets & fast food places, courier companies, bookstores…you name it…most are doing such a fantastically bad job in Pune. I wonder how the franchiser doesn’t care about his name, goodwill and investment built over decades, being poured freely down the drain at the Pune end of things.
A few examples will suffice…I’m sure readers will have many of their own. A well known food store opens a franchise here. Their cold storage section, after the first few clean and virtuous weeks, is a sight that the PMC might want to examine. No ventilation, badly functioning refrigeration and air-conditioning, rivulets of melted ice and blood (of fish and fowl) running across the floor, and a welcome dance by 16 shapely flies. On top of it, when you invoke the name of the famous food store that is their Father Franchiser, the man inside this disaster zone says brashly: “Flies are everywhere ma’am; and the floor will get cleaned in the afternoon.”
I walk into a big clothes store, frachisee of another biggy from a big city. Same story. Not flies and yukky floors here, but empty shelves, gum chewing staff that is busy talking to each other, stopping only to shout gaily to you: “Out of stock ma’am!”
And so it is with the bookstores (whose staff was till yesterday maybe working at the clothes store) where you draw blank looks if you ask for anything beyond an ageing diva’s books. Unawareness and who-cares-ness rules here too.
Courier companies, bless their confused hearts and souls, simply don’t reach their destination at the Pune end. They don’t think its part of the job. And if you follow this up to its bitter end, you’re likely to hear: there was no one in your house, or your address is very difficult. If you ask why they couldn’t call you from the phone number on your packet, they shout out loudly, laughingly, to someone else in the room in Marathi or Hindi, the rough translation being: “Hey somebody take the phone and talk to this ill-tempered aunty who’s asking all these questions.” The person at the other end laughs riotously back and advises: “Array rakh dey na phone nichay, idiot.”
I kid you not, these are all franchises of huge national and international brand name companies.
I didn’t go to B-school and I don’t come from a business family, so maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but isn’t franchising a system of marketing and distribution in which an independent businessperson, for a fee, is granted the right to market the goods or services of the franchisor according to the established, successful standards and practices of the franchisor? Ideally, I am told, the franchise system forms the perfect marriage between big business and the small businessperson. The franchisor obtains new sources of expansion capital, new distribution markets, and self-motivated vendors of its products, while the franchisee acquires the products, expertise, stability, and marketing savvy usually available only to larger enterprises. “Both franchisor and franchisee have a strong vested interest in the success of the brand and keeping their customers happy,” I read somewhere.
Kuch gadbad hai. Maybe it’s the steep climb up the Ghats, but something seems to be falling by the wayside. High time the big ticket franchisors made their way up to Pune and took a look at what their franchisees are really up to, don’t you think?