I want to get your opinion on a pet hate of mine. I’ve recently found a lot of top-class restaurants offer their salt in a tiny shallow dish. You take a pinch of salt with your fingers.
I find this repulsive because in my mind is the bloke who goes to the toilet before the meal, doesn’t wash his hands, then takes a pinch of salt from the same receptacle. Why can’t all restaurants use the more hygienic option of shakers?
I would hope that a top-class restaurant would empty the salt dish after every sitting, clean it out and replace the salt. But even that leaves the possibility that someone in your group might not wash their hands. Actually, not washing hands after going to the bathroom is just one of the scenarios that would put me off this way of dispensing salt. Simply not washing hands on arrival at the restaurant could introduce germs to the salt dish. But that doesn’t help much. When you find these salt dispensers at any restaurant, you must make your concerns known. Ask for a shaker or grinder. I reckon if enough diners make the same point, the restaurant will change its ways. This reminds me of a campaign I fought on Fair Go to stop dairy owners from wrapping their bare, dirty hands around ice-cream cones. It seemed an impossible battle at the time. But now it’s rare to find a dairy owner serving coned ice cream not using a cone-cover or disposable glove. I won’t accept the ice cream otherwise. Good luck.
We are in a terrible dispute with a motel at a popular resort. We arrived a day late and the owner said we would be charged in full for that day because we didn’t cancel in time. We thought that too tough. Our response was to cancel the remaining four nights and stay elsewhere. Unfortunately we had paid in advance. Now they will not pay us back anything. What should we do?
The motel owners had no right to charge you the full rate for the day you didn’t turn up. They are permitted only to charge for their losses, which wouldn’t amount to a full day’s tariff because you would not have used any services, and presumably they didn’t have to clean the room that day. They would normally just hold on to the equivalent of a deposit. However, you have muddied the waters by cancelling the rest of your stay. They may now have the right to deduct the equivalent of a deposit from all five days because you cancelled so late. But they cannot hold on to all of your money. I would allow them to retain the equivalent of a deposit on all five days and demand the rest of the money back. If they refuse to do so, complain to the Motel Association of New Zealand.
If you have no luck there, take the motel to the Disputes Tribunal. You may successfully argue that the motel’s unfair position over day one put you off staying with them at all and get away with paying just one day’s deposit. You will now realise it was unwise to pay a motel in full in advance. Best wishes for the battles ahead. I’m sure you’ll succeed.
