Mind your manners

There is an old saw in English folk wisdom "Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves". You can generalise that sentiment: if you pay attention to small-small t'ings then bigger benefits will fall into place. Straight-forward good manners - please; thank you; no, after you -  costs so little and it can yield great inclusive benefits. Setting people at their ease will make them more forth-coming, more productive or in some other sense more useful. It took me a long time to realise this.

On foot of that The Beloved heard a clip on the wireless about differential coffee prices according to the politeness of the customer. As she said, that is a nice conceit which encourages the minimum of respect required for the servitor and the transaction. I have two daughters in the catering trade, that's all they ask for. But the wireless has no sources, so I went to Uncle Google to find out where this happened and whether is was 'news'.

• Dec 2013 La Petite Syrah, Nice, France [picture above].
• Oct 2014. Seven Mile Beach Kiosk Café,  Gerroa, NSW, Australia. Same concept but in English.
• Mar 2016. L'Hamburgé, Grenoble, France. in France: citing La Petite Syrah.
• Jul 2016 CUPS Coffee & Tea, Roanoke, VA, USA. Ditto as Oz 2014.
• Sep 2016 Restaurant Blau Grifeu in Llança, Spain. Same but in Spanish.

So my researches indicate that a) this is not news b) this is probably original to La Petite Syrah in 2013 c) more people could take our course in how not to plagiarise. Or as we say in The Institute: "Give Credit Where Credit is due". Which, in the small print, is acknowledged to owe a debt to a similar document produced by Dundalk IT = DKIT.