Basin Cafe

Tourist prices, uncomprehending staff and an inconvenient walk from the CBD
On at least 2 separate occasions I’ve attempted to redeem a shop-a-docket offer from Woolworths supermarkets at this cafe. This is what happens: I present the shop-a-docket, which states: “Buy 1 breakfast (or lunch) & receive a 2nd breakfast (or lunch) for free” & say something like “I’ll have the buy 1, get 1 free deal”. Instead of taking my order, the staff member assumes that I am requesting to eat (at least 1) meal for free. In other words, that my intention is to pay them no money at all (for anything) & get (at least) 1 meal for free. It seems that they either take the customer for an idiot, unable to understand their offer, or a scammer or some such. So, it seems that their offer of “Buy 1 breakfast (or lunch) & receive a 2nd breakfast (or lunch) for free” does not mean the same thing as my order of “I’ll have the buy 1, get 1 free deal”. Ok, then what does their offer mean? The staff (including the manager, I presume, the last time that this happened to me) interpret their offer as meaning “Buy 2, get 1 free”. To me, this means that if you pay for 2 meals, you get a 3rd meal for free. I take that as an attempt to not honour their own offer & to sting the customer for an even greater amount than what they should be paying. Comically, the last time that this happened, the manager, I presume, restated what the offer was in such a way that I said “I accept”. Prior to this, he had told me to “take your business elsewhere”, after I grew exasperated with his inability to understand his own establishment’s simple shop-a-docket offer or my simple paraphrase of it. A young staff member, trying to help me, expressed my intention to the manager in such a way that I couldn’t really tell the difference between what I had asked for & how he had ‘rephrased’ it. However, it was apparently sufficiently different (somehow) for the manager to take my order. This came after the manager told me that the offer was for ‘buy 2, get 1 free’.