M&S Café — Restaurant in Sheffield

The staff here are, for the most part, appalling slow (with the exception of one younger girl with dark hair who wears a “master barista” top, who generally does a great job - this review does not apply to her), the rest, however, are pretty much awful across the board. I want to be clear though I still see this as training / procedural issue, rather than an attack on any individual(s).

I was queuing up today along with about 5 others and the one woman serving took 7 minutes to serve two people (who were together), chit-chatting about nonsense while people are waiting. Totally oblivious to the situation and context.

While your staff (and I’m sure some of the many pensioners that frequent the cafe) may have “all the time in the world”, other customers do not….

So a few points:

1. You’re a cafe selling food and drink, you are not selling a chit-chat service, if you feel there is a reasonable demand from people wanting to pay you to have some company, launch a separate service that does that. This does not mean you need to be rude, it means you maintain focus on “why we are here” and move things along with a reasonable velocity.

2. Learn to put coffees on and take food orders while existing orders are being fulfilled. Costa, Starbucks, Nero….in fact, literally any other cafe I can think of, has this capability. You ask the next person in line what their drink order is while the current person is still waiting to pay/ receive their order at busy times.

3. Be mindful of customers time, at all times. Saying “sorry for your waiting” every time I go is not acceptable as doesn’t give me my time back - I can’t do jack with “sorry”, can I? Life is fast paced for many these days and people sometimes have 20 minutes or so to get some food before they have to be elsewhere, which should be more than enough time for a cafe that uses button-press machines for their coffee and sells pre-prepared, warmed-up only sandwiches. On this occasion I had to shovel my food in as soon as it arrived and then leave half of my coffee.

4. If you genuinely only want to offer a slow service for pensioners and you see that as your target demographic, have the consideration to at least...

We used to go to the cafe every week before they changed the menu last autumn. Now there isn't the choice for us. We like the ombiance and space but we don't like spicy and prefer traditional British food. We used to love the prawn cocktail jacket potato with the delicious unusual rainbow salad (I wish it was sold in our foodhall!), but that all disappeared last autumn along with other favourites. We've found another cafe in Crystal Peaks with tradtional home cooked lunches which suits our taste better...

The staff at this cafe need training in basic customer service. I asked for a certain item of food and it wasn’t available; there was no ‘sorry’ just we haven’t got it. When the waitress brought the food, she didn’t speak, just handed our food without a word. She then held the cutlery in front of my son and expected him to be a mind reader. It’s a shame M&S you usually are top rated, but not...