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Cafe Noir Zielona Góra, a Fall from Grace !

A few years ago a new pub opened in Zielona Góra, Cafe Noir, which means black Coffee in french. Cafe Noir has a nice approach to combining pub and night club, by having a dance floor in one room and all the other rooms dedicated to normal pub meetings. They have sofas and many different mish mash interior design, even a piano, which gives it a unique relaxed style.

Cafe Noir have been gaining in popularity the last few years, it is located in the heart of the downtown (deptak), and have been seen as a replacement destination to other pubs that have closed like 4Rose, Barcelona Cafe and more recently Warka. Thus the Cafe Noir clientele is expanding, and growing, while the locale itself is limited, making it on most weekends fully packed.

 

Bad Business Strategies

Success can lead to bad business decisions, when you have more clients than you can serve, you have the false assumption that clients can be treated badly and will still come. That’s exactly what is happening with Cafe Noir in Zielona Góra.

Cafe Noir’s administration have decided to put in charge of the cloakroom a bunch of aggressive bullies. These bullies go around the rooms to see who still have a jacket on, and ask whoever have a jacket or backpacks to put them in cloakroom for the fee of 5 PLN. Whomever does not comply is aggressively asked to leave.

The fee itself is small, and even if you don’t have money on you, you can pay with credit card on the bar. However, this is not the issue, the issue is that this is not an approach that should be taken, and you do not treat your clients like this.

These fees are probably the money the cloakroom team get to share as payment for their work, and hence you understand why they have such an aggressive approach, because simply their interest is to collect as much 5 PLN as possible, even if that does not align with the medium and long term interest of the pub itself.

 

Personal Experience

This friday i went to Cafe Noir with 5 friends, when the bullies came, not having any cash on me, i went to the bar to pay with a credit card and get a ticket, when i came back to where we were sitting i saw the bullies asking my 2 friends to leave because they did not want to put their items in the lockers. My turkish friend wanted to stay 30 min and thus did not want to pay for just staying 30 min, and my other friend did not want to put her backpack in a cloakroom run by a bunch of guys who look as if they just got out of prison. My 2 friends left, i did leave with them, but not before leaving my ticket at the entrance in hope it would be used by someone else.

 

Bad Reviews Avalanche

Our group that meets almost every week, have taken the decision to no longer meet in Cafe Noir, it is a shame, but i do understand that this type of treatment, humiliating in a way, should not go without a strong action. And i am pretty sure, that we are not the only group of people that are taking such decision based on similar experience. A quick check of the online reviews shows that many clients are angry enough to leave a bad review. Here’s a selection of some: