Saying “please” Can Save You Money

By Author: Steve Robinson
Total Articles: 468
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Most people try to take advantage of cheap travel deals, particularly cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, and cheap vacation packages when planning a trip to save money. Now visitors to Nice, France can save even more at a French café which charges polite customers less for coffee.

Prices posted at a French café make it clear that polite customers can enjoy their coffee for less than rude customers.

There is a sign in the shop which explains its tiered coffee pricing. Customers who order a coffee at the Le Petite Syrah café pay 7 euros, equal to about nine dollars and fifty cents. However, customers who say “please” when ordering their coffee only have to pay 4.25 Euros, or around six dollars.

Coffee can be had at an even lower price of 1.4 Euros, or two dollars, by saying “Good morning, a coffee, please.”

The café’s tiered pricing seems unusual in a country where its waiters are famed for their perceived rudeness. Still the café’s owner felt that this pricing approach was necessary.

He observed that he has a tiny restaurant run by himself and his wife. Over ...
... time they found at lunchtime people were becoming increasingly rude, stressed, and sometimes rude to them when they ordered a coffee.

His inspiration for this tiered coffee pricing was inspired by signs he had seen in Italy and elsewhere in France. While the owner has never charged more than 1.4 euros for a coffee, and questions whether it is even legal to charge different prices based on a customer’s behavior, he has found that his sign touting different prices based on how polite customers are has resulted in his customers acting differently.

Initially some customers tried to get free customers by being even more polite than the sign saying such things as “Hello, you highness, will you serve me one of your beautiful coffees?” However, most customers were amused by the sign and the owner believes that it helps them relax.

The goal of the sign is to remind patrons that everyone is a human being and that how you interact with others should not change based on your status in life.

A photo of the sign, which was first displayed last summer, went viral after a French journalist tweeted a picture of it. French TV stations starting calling the owner. He observed that the world has become too fast. “We are too stressed by the world. That’s the same as how this Internet has reacted to this sign.”

Travel experts have observed that polite passengers who make civil requests of airline personnel are far more likely to be responded to positively than passengers who scream and try to intimidate airline agents.
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