The Old Barn Farm, Three Legged Cross

As a member of staff at the Old Barn Farm I thought I would try and put across a different point of view. Many years ago the OBF was busy every night, weekends you couldn't move in the place. However, a number of serious errors of judgement on the part of the area manager led to two extremely poor managers in succession being placed in the pub. This put the pub in its downward spiral from which it has seriously struggle to recover despite now having had a number of good manager. The current staff do care big time and do their utmost to keep the customer happy, however you cannot please all of the people all of the time. The main problem comes from way above the manager. The pub is seriously in need of a refurb but they won't give it to us because we are not profitable enough (viscous circle). The manager is given a wages budget and gets in trouble for exceeding this. Therefore there can sometimes not be enough staff on the cope with an unexpected number of people, especially in the summer. As a member of staff I must tell all customers past or present who have a bad experience, please do not write us off. We all try our hardest when we are working and I get extremly frustrated when due to sheer numbers of customers and not enough staff that I cannot serve any quicker and people get upset. To those people who were unfortunate to come in during our 'dodgy manager' period perhaps you could come back and give us another try. M&B has spent �2m on a new menu and it is now really good - even I eat here so it can't be that bad. During the bad manager period even I stopped coming as a customer but now we come all the time.

1 Sep 2008 12:47