The owner of a tea room labelled “the worst place ever” in a TripAdvisor review has said promoting the negative message has proved an unexpected marketing masterstroke.
Caty Jones, owner of K Teas Cakes in Wolverhampton, said the customer visited on a “really unexpectedly busy day” and service was slow, which led her to apologise to people and ultimately gave him a refund for his sandwich.
An hour later the negative review appeared online, but rather than ignoring it, she posted it on a chalk board outside the business and online, urging people to come in and try “the worst place ever”.
As well as pulling in extra customers, she said it had generated many more positive reviews, describing the response as “wild”.
“Everybody in Wolverhampton decided to come in last Monday so service was admittedly a little bit slower than normal,” Ms Jones, who has run the cafe since 2017, said.
“We apologised because service was slow and then one of them decided to bring his sandwich back and demanded a refund because he didn’t want to eat it.”
Handing back the refund, she said she anticipated a negative review, but when it was posted online she said the content of it felt “unexpected, unjustified and quite harsh”.
Instead of being offended, she said she had seen others use a bad review to create some positivity for their businesses, so she decided to try it herself.
“I could have taken it really badly, I could have been hurt by it, but I decided to see the light side of it and see if I could make a couple of people laugh,” she said.
The reaction to her post online had been “mad”, she said, and within minutes of putting her post on Facebook and Instagram the reaction “went wild”.
“I had so many wonderfully, lovely comments I literally spent an hour trying to reply to people before I gave up because there were just too many comments,” she said.
She said she had since had customers come in saying they had come to try “the worst place ever”.
“We’re all struggling, we’re not making a massive amount of money but as a business we’re still here and we’re still fighting to be here because we’ve got a lovely little community in here and sometimes they depend on us,” she said.
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