Payment – an undervalued part of the meal experience?†

Abstract

The research presented in this paper focuses on the service performance of the staff in à la Carte restaurants, and how this could influence the meal experience from the customers’ point of view. Following a mainly grounded theory approach, the empirical material that formed the background for this article was five focus group interviews of restaurant customers from the cities of Oslo and Stavanger in Norway. The participants represented persons from different lines of work. Payment is initially considered here as a component of the meal, and the results indicate that payment represents an important part of the service aspect. Hence, payment operations represent the main component within the last stage of the meal experience. When customers experience the payment process in an unsatisfactory way, it can have a negative effect on their meal experiences as a whole. This could in turn have a negative impact on the customers’ incentive to revisit the particular restaurant or even other restaurants. Payment ‘just in time’ as perceived by the customers can have a positive effect on the number of customers in the restaurant in the long term. The data analysis uncovers nine specific aspects of payment that are important to the customers. A conceptual model is developed to show the process from raw data to results.