Dear Manager,

I am writing to complain about a disappointing experience I had tonight at your cinema.

At around 7pm, I was at the food counter on the ground floor, waiting for my turn. A man suddenly came to the side of the woman in front of me, who was ordering and paying for her snacks, and it was clear to me he was intending to cut queue. As soon as the person before me had finished with her transaction, he cut queue and placed his order. I said to him, “Excuse me, there is a queue.” In an extremely rude manner, he claimed that I had appeared out of nowhere and that he had been in the queue all along. Not only did he profess this blatant lie, he enlisted the cashier in it, saying to him that he had surely seen him in the queue. Your cashier took his order before mine.

I made sure that I gave your extremely unprofessional cashier a piece of my mind for letting that courtesy-challenged public nuisance cut queue.

That ill-mannered and inconsiderate people exist is not the issue I am bringing up here. You have no control over that.

But what you do have control over are your employees’ responses in such situations. Your cashier was clearly aware that I was waiting in line, and that someone had not just cut in front of me but claimed he was right to do so. Your cashier chose to attend to his order first anyway, thereby not just sanctioning that boorish customer’s behaviour, but also surely allowing him to feel justified in continuing to inflict his lack of basic decency upon others.

Your cashier is an embarrassment to your company. Your cashier’s behaviour reflects badly on Sathyam Cinemas, not on him. I won’t even remember his face, but your company’s is the name I will connect to the experience.

In other words, Sathyam Cinemas encourages idiots to impinge upon the time and rights of paying customers. Is that the message you intend to send? Because that’s the one I got, loud and clear, and the one I intend to pass on to other people.

There is no point in promoting yourselves as a leisure destination when your own staff ensure that your customers have poor experiences at your cinema.

Do think about it. I, for one, will certainly think twice before I patronize your poorly-run food counters again, if not your cinema itself.

Sharanya

Update Aug 10: They responded yesterday. Their email and my reply in the comments section.