Bad service

Much has been said about the poor service standards of establishments in Singapore. Despite the many initiatives to improve the standards, I hardly see any improvement coz I had 2 unpleasant experiences within a week.

First was a trip to K-Box at Hougang Plaza on a weekend night. The place wasn't packed due to its ulu location. We estimated only about 10 rooms were in use & 5 staff were on duty that day. Less customers didn't mean better service. They took forever to prepare our drinks or refill the titbits and kept mixing up our drink orders. The compulsary $6 titbits was only refilled once despite constant reminder to do so. If you want to charge people so much for some peanuts, make sure you give them quantity worth their price! And the drinks? Twice they served us cold drinks when we ordered the hot version. Knowing it'll take forever for them to bring the correct drink, we made do with the wrong drinks. We don't mind the run-down place with sofas patched with masking tapes, but at least give us good service! My friend vowed never to go to this branch again.

The next incident was at Swensens (Bugis branch). We weren't given any plain water while the rest of the customers were. First the waitress taking order didn't serve it. Then the waitress serving the 1st dish didn't serve. Next another waitress who collected the plates didn't serve. The same waitress who served us earlier didn't serve us water when she brought the ice-cream later. When we noted that everyone else was served plain water the moment they sat down, we checked with 1 of the staff if plain water is chargeable (nope, it isn't). The male staff immediately apologized and promptly served us our plain water. When our ice-cream came, it had melted a little. And one of the ice-cream order was wrong. We're not sure if this is a serious lack in attentiveness of the waitresses or a case of racial discrimination. But this made us very pissed off with the service in the restaurant. We're never going to Bugis Swensens again!

Compared to the service I've experienced in Taiwan & Japan, Singapore sure has a long way to go!