Pimp my Waffle! Now, with more whole-grain suck!

[Seanette]

Advertisers do like to take advantage of trendy buzzwords and hype.

[Jester]

First, under the assumption that night auditors don't have enough to do, some shining mind at a higher pay grade than me decided to make the night auditors set out the breakfast. The breakfast attendant just maintains it.

Because it would make far too much sense for management to have the breakfast attendant set up the breakfast that they'll be attending to. Oh, wait....that would entail them paying an extra few dollars an hour to someone, rather than being able to cut costs and have someone do two jobs at once. Silly me. I'm actually surprised they don't have the front desk people take care of the breakfast all the way through, and eliminate the superfluous "breakfast attendant."

"No, I only drink organic water."

Many people are wary of having water that has any dihyrogen monoxide in it. And who can blame them? That stuff can be dangerous!

When he'd gone through the whole bowl, and come up with the two most perfect apples to be found in it, he clutched them to his chest and scurried away.

"My Precioussess....."

My question is.......what does "two and a half person" mean?

At a guess, I'd say that is two adults and one small child, like an infant or a toddler. We use that phrase all the time in the restaurant industry, as an amusing way to refer to children or to inquire if the party will need a high chair or a booster seat.

I've also seen a hotel that passive-aggressively tried to get people to stop eating so much by cutting the muffins and bagels into four pieces. Technically the bagels ended up in eight pieces. It was so weird.

I've see than at a lot of hotels, but I don't know that it's an attempt to get guests to eat less so much as it is a way to offer various sized portions to guests who may have different sized appetites. I've usually seen the muffins downsized to mini-muffins rather than cut up, but I've seen bagels, waffles, and fresh fruit sliced up to give people options . If you'd ever seen my mother and I eat breakfast together, you'd understand just how different portion sizes for people can be. Hell, I could eat her portion, my stepfather's portion, my little sister's portion, and put away quite a bit more without batting an eye....and I'm not exactly a big guy.

Well, Bill's from the hotel... he doesn't have any arms or legs. His twin Matt is in front of the tub.

Don't get me started on those jokes....I have a LOT of them!

[fireheart]

That reminds me of something I was discussing with a friend the other day... If someone more knowledgeable than I could explain why my dayquil and ibuprofen say "Gluten Free", given I assumed that would already be the case, I'd be very interested to know!

From what I remember, I think it's more so people will go through the shops quicker instead of having to individually check every single packet. Also, gluten free diets have become the latest fad -.- (note, this is not referring to those individuals who are genuinely coeliac or have a wheat allergy or similar, this is referring to those people who are on gluten free diets when they don't need to be)

[manybellsdown]

That reminds me of something I was discussing with a friend the other day... If someone more knowledgeable than I could explain why my dayquil and ibuprofen say "Gluten Free", given I assumed that would already be the case, I'd be very interested to know!

Some medications do use some form of gluten as a binding agent - usually pills. Vitamin supplements are a big offender. Of course, they do sometimes label things "gluten free" that are obvious, but there's a lot of things that you wouldn't even think had gluten in them. Or don't need to have gluten, but they added it anyway (like flour in seasoning salts).

Soy sauce is the #1 thing that I find people are surprised at. It's not always (or even usually) just soybeans. They use flour as a fermentation base. Most soy sauce you see at the store will have wheat in it. So anything that uses soy sauce is suspect; and a LOT of things use soy sauce.

(My father and all my siblings are celiacs, and I married a celiac with a celiac son. This is pretty much my life.)

[fireheart]

Soy sauce is the #1 thing that I find people are surprised at. It's not always (or even usually) just soybeans. They use flour as a fermentation base. Most soy sauce you see at the store will have wheat in it. So anything that uses soy sauce is suspect; and a LOT of things use soy sauce.

(My father and all my siblings are celiacs, and I married a celiac with a celiac son. This is pretty much my life.)

A few companies (such as Kikkoman) make both a gluten and gluten-free variant. I only know this as we tend to get the gluten form, but work gets the gluten-free one.

[wolfie]

Here in Australia they have an expiry date on salt. You know, pure sodium chloride the chemical.

I suppose if it was organic salt it would last longer.

Organic salt? The only kind I can think of that would belong in the kitchen would be Sodium Bicarbonate, a.k.a. baking soda. Chemically, it's classed as a salt, and the (chemist's) definition of "organic" is that it's a carbon compound.

There's a website (last looked a few years ago, might not be around any more) that gave shelf lives for various food products. Fun fact: table salt and distilled liquor were the only things that had "indefinite" (i.e. unlimited so long as they don't get contaminated) shelf lives for OPENED packages.

But yeah, many "expiration" dates on products are really just date codes for quality control in case there's a problem with a batch and don't correspond to any noticeable actual product degradation.

And some jurisdictions require ALL food products to have expiration dates, with the longest "packaging to expiration" time being set by law.

There is a brand of water I've seen for sale advertising itself as 'pure water' that 'fish has never swam in'. I've overthought this concept to death and still can't come up any situation which would guarantee that individual water molecules have never touched a fish.

Purified rainwater from a rainwater tank?

Nope - could have evaporated from a body of water where fish swam before it rained down and was collected. To guarantee the individual molecules had never touched a fish, you'd need to make the water by burning hydrogen.

[Alpha Strike]

"Please Steal From Us" guarantee

I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and assume this is NOT the official name of the policy. What, in theory, is this guarantee supposed to do?

[Ironclad Alibi]

Organic water? We always called that polluted water.

[sirwired]

I'm going to a stab in the dark here and assume this is NOT the official name of the policy. What, in theory, is this guarantee supposed to do?

It's a guarantee that many hotel chains have that if you aren't satisfied in any way with your room, you get one night free. SC's view this as an invitation to make up some silly complaint and score a free night.

[wolfie]

Of course, corporate should be tracking incidents of the guarantee being used, not just on a "which locations have dissatisfied customers" basis (to try to improve service), but which customers are never satisfied. After all, a perpetually dissatsified customer, who routinely gets a free night, is going to cost the company money rather than being profitable.

If a particular customer has more than a threshold percentage of dissatisfaction (making allowances for infrequent guests - someone who invoked the guarantee on their only stay would have a 100% dissatisfaction rate, but that's due to small sample size rather than expectations excessive to the chain's standards), the hotel chain should politely suggest that they stay elsewhere, since the chain's standards of operation clearly don't meet the customer's expectation.

If, when they reach the "too picky to rent" stage, they have any outstanding reservations (i.e. on a road trip), there are various ways the chain could handle things, with the extremes being to honour the reservations (but not allow them to make any new ones) and to cancel the reservations without notice. I'd lean toward calling the phone number associated with the reservations and letting them know that the reservations are canceled. If that means leaving voice mail on their home phone while they're out on the road expecting a room to be ready for them (when an event in town has all hotels sold out), that's their problem.