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I was going to one for a while where the wife never even asked my name when I ordered. Not even the first time. Yet, when I showed up, she knew. Same for every customer.
I used a seamstress for 20 years. Same thing.
Their excellent yet casual customer service is a thing of beauty. I'm impressed with their ability to do that.
A lot of it, honestly, might be just coming from a society where everyone hasn’t been ground down into a weird consumerist nightmare of uncaring existence.
Once you’ve experienced health care or restaurants or factories or more or less anything, in a location where people you are interacting with treat one another like interesting valuable human beings worthy of respect and human interaction, even if there’s some money involved, it starts to seem really weird the American way where everything has to be on a system and no one gives a shit.
It's generally pretty easy to figure out by the timing and also by context. You know you have three takeout orders up and you know approximately what the voices sounded like over the phone so you can take a good guess at matching a face to it. Occasionally we'd get it wrong on the first guess, but we'd always verify the contents of the order and phone number before forking it over.
And it's dead easy when you only have one takeout order open. The customer still thinks you're psychic. They won't know the other six bags lined up on the back of the steam table are all deliveries...
You also get to know all your regulars pretty quickly.
There was a Thai place I used to go to a lot. Hours were inconsistent and they would close for months at a time when the brothers who owned it would go back to Thailand from time to time. Best Thai food I've ever had. More impressive though was their customer service. Super friendly and they remembered everyone's names.
You could go there for the first time, not go again for months, and the next time you showed up they'd greet you by name and remember what it was you had ordered last time.