In Tokyo, there is a restaurant where customers are happy to get bad service. You ask for dumplings, and you get miso soup. Whoops. You order grilled fish, and maybe you get sushi. Wait a minute. What? It’s a regular thing for the waiters and waitresses to mix things up, bring the wrong meal, misunderstand what a customer requests, or actually drink the glass of water they were meant to deliver to some table. So, you go thirsty for a bit. This sort of thing gets these workers hired, not fired. Is this performance art? No, it’s mostly in Kyoto, and these waiters and waitresses all have dementia. It isn’t a flaw. It’s the feature. It’s the primary qualification for the job.
All this happens at the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders. It has been organized as a recurring pop-up, held a number of times over several days, to broaden the public’s awareness of dementia. The gentle surprise of the inadvertent human mistakes has become, in a way, the actual product of the restaurant—more than the desired meal itself. Much of the laughter that fills the eatery arises from the pleasant shock of seeing what you are actually, unexpectedly being served. Sometimes you might even get your coffee with a straw.
A Japanese television director, Shiro Oguni, created this business to change perceptions about aging and progressive cognitive impairment. Dementia is a general term describing decline in memory, learning and communication skills. It’s caused by a number of different conditions, one of them being Alzheimer’s, which is a specific disease. The first event was organized in 2017 and has been regularly repeated. It required around $115,000 raised through crowd-funding to get started, yet it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a profitable, everyday restaurant built around Oguni’s mission. (Somebody should attempt it.) The idea for his project occurred to him when he was served a dumpling instead of a burger while visiting a nursing home. At first, he was going to send the dumpling back, but then he realized he was in a different world, with varying levels of functionality, including mistakes that didn’t really harm him. Why not just accept what he received as a way of respecting the difficulties the people around him faced, as an act of kindness and humility?
Oguni has tried to make it easy to share what his group has learned so that others can replicate the initiative elsewhere. (The program’s website encourages and offers contact information to anyone who wants to try a similar event anywhere in the world.) His moveable feast has inspired initiatives in South Korea and Australia. It required crowd-funding upfront because it needs a lot of planning and teamwork from many sectors: restaurant professionals, interior design, social welfare oversight, and the cooperation of organizations already helping those struggling with dementia.
What’s wonderful about the project is that it presents people living with dementia as happy, industrious, helpful, communicative, and gracious. Everyone is having fun in the videos that have been done to document the project. The elderly staff in their simple, cheerful uniforms, look as engaged and productive as people a third their age. Instead of reacting to dementia as frightening, depressing and dreadfully isolating, the responses are almost precisely the opposite: diners describe the experience as cute, happy, funny, gregarious and comfortable.
During one of the first pop-ups, 37 percent of the orders were mistaken, but afterward, 99 percent of the customers said they were happy with their meal. At one event, one of the servers absent-mindedly sat with her customers. Another asked one diner to take orders from the others around the table. None of this fazed anyone who came to eat. They know they are coming for something like compassionate and improvisational cabaret comedy. Oguni has said that his project isn’t simply about being more understanding and embracing of those who have dementia; he’s trying to show how people can be kind to one another, regardless of shortcomings.
This video struck me as almost the most extreme example of what I have been advocating for two decades. Since I published my first book, I’ve insisted that we have entered a world of permanent excess supply: all products and services quickly descend to the status of commodities now. Restaurants, for example, are everywhere, constantly appearing and going out of business. The only way an enterprise can differentiate itself is by creating deep, trusting bonds with individual customers: the most important job for all employees is strengthening that bond. An enduring and caring relationship between employees and individual customers becomes the fulcrum for a company’s success and growth. Technology can make this easier in many ways: through data mining, database management that gives employees quick access to information about a particular customer and user-friendly interfaces for online interaction. But the warmth of a smiling, patient worker who knows a customer’s name and understands what that customer needs and wants will win out over lower prices at an impersonal competitor. Creating an organization where this reverses itself—where the customer cares so much about the people serving him that they keep coming back—would be the perfect realization of this sustaining bond.
When the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders is in business, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Why does this matter to most businesses that have to deliver exactly what a customer wants? Because it illustrates how customer loyalty is the key to all success, achieved through a caring relationship between employees and customers. In most businesses, the employees provide the most care for others. In this case, it’s the customers. The roles are reversed. The customer is taking care of the employee.
Customers come to the restaurant to support and give these waiters and waitresses a chance, so the diners don’t care whether they get the meal they ordered as long as they have an opportunity to enjoy an impromptu friendship with the one serving. The human relationship creates the income, as it must now in any business. A business is a group of people taking care of another group, providing something that these other people need or want. Here, the human relationship, kindness, and fellowship is both the product and the service, provided equally by both sides in the equation, those serving and those being served. It’s hard to imagine a more extreme example for what I advocate.
Japan is said to have the largest population of older people, so it’s natural that a project like this would spring up there. But a wave of aging is going to sweep over the world. The 35 million suffering from dementia worldwide is expected to increase to 115 million around 2050. Oguni says, “We want to change society to become more caring and easy-going, so, dementia or no dementia, we can live together in harmony.”
It’s hard to imagine a more noble mission statement for any profitable enterprise. Nor, potentially, a more profitable one.
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