The Innkeeper's Rule

Dear friend,

The riddle first. Still in the old town, out on the coaching road this time, where the trade arrives at all hours and not all of it is worth having.

Two inns stand on one coaching road,
Both take the traveller and his load.
One takes all coin that comes his way,
One sends a shouting crowd away.
By spring, one's rooms are cold and bare.
Who paid for whom? Now answer fair.

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two inns on the coaching road outside the town I've never named, and the beds, in the traditional manner, were equally good. Same size, same number of rooms, same cook worth the detour.

The first innkeeper had one rule, and he'd have told you it was the first commandment of trade: never refuse coin. So he took the carters who came in at midnight singing, and the gentleman who wanted the best room at half price and got it after twenty minutes of sighing at the counter, and the party of six who broke a shutter and argued about it until it was easier to say nothing. Every one of those nights, he was full. Every one of those mornings, he had taken money. Show him a ledger and he'd point at the takings and call it a good year.

What the ledger did not show him was the leaving. The commercial travellers, four or five of them, monthly as the moon, who paid full without a murmur and wanted nothing but a quiet bed and an egg at seven: they stopped coming, one by one, and not one of them told him why. Why would they? A man doesn't write a letter of complaint about a night's sleep he didn't get. He simply rides on to the next inn next month. Then his best girl left, because she was tired of being shouted at over the price of a shutter, and the new girl was not as good, and the eggs suffered. His yard stayed full and his takings thinned, and he raised his advertising, and worked harder, and could not for the life of him work out what had gone wrong with the road.

The second innkeeper had a rule too, and hers was written down and pinned inside the door of the parlour, which is where a rule has to live if it is going to survive ten o'clock at night. Hers said which trade she would not take: no parties that arrive shouting, no haggling at the counter, no guest who has already spoken poorly to a member of staff.

The town liked to tell the story of the night she used it. A coach party, loud, at ten, in a bad autumn when her rooms were half empty and every publican on the road would have taken them. She was courteous as a curate: no room tonight, sir, and the inn two miles on will look after you. And she stood in her own doorway and watched forty shillings drive away.

Upstairs, five travellers slept, and had their eggs at seven, and came back the next month and the next year, and told other travellers, and her inn became known on that road as the place where a man could sleep. Which meant she could charge properly, keep her staff, and choose her guests, and the rule that had cost her forty shillings in one bad autumn bought her the quiet trade of a whole decade.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Every yes to the wrong customer is a no to the right one. That is the whole arithmetic, and it hides because the two halves of it never appear on the same page. The yes is loud, dated, and written in the takings column. The no is silent, unrecorded, and happens months later in a decision made about you by somebody who was never rude enough to explain themselves.

Understand what a bad customer actually costs, because it is never the price of the shutter. It is the room they occupied, which is capacity, and you have only so much. It is the hours of grief, taken from work that would have paid. It is the staff, who leave the trades that make them apologise for things that are not their fault. And above all it is the good customers who quietly went elsewhere, whose departure you will never once be told about. Add those four and the wrong guest is not a thin profit. He is a loss, paid for by everyone else in the building.

And here is the part that surprises people: refusal is marketing. Not the sulky kind, done in temper on a busy night. The pinned-up kind, decided in daylight and applied without grievance, because a rule made at ten o'clock in an empty autumn is not a rule, it's a mood. You learned from the clockmender that a price chooses your crowd; a standard chooses it a second time, and more sharply. Who you turn away tells the road exactly who you keep.

Three questions, and do the first with the ledger and the diary side by side:

1. What did your three worst customers of the past year really cost? Not the invoice; the hours, the redone work, the staff morale, the jobs you couldn't take because they were in the room. Put a number on it, even a rough one. It is nearly always larger than what they paid, and seeing it written down is what finally gives a trade its spine.
2. What is your written rule, and where is it pinned? Three or four plain lines saying who you don't serve and on what terms you don't serve them. Write it now, while the till is calm and you are brave, so that the version of you standing at the counter at ten at night on a bad Tuesday has something to obey that isn't fear.
3. Who would you serve with the room they're taking up? Name them. The quiet monthly regular, the job you keep turning down for lack of hours, the customer you'd take ten more of. A refusal is only frightening while the space it makes is imaginary; once you can see who belongs in that room, saying no to the wrong guest stops feeling like losing and starts feeling like tidying.

The Answer to the Riddle

Who paid for whom?

The good guests paid for the bad ones, every night, in full, and got a worse night's sleep for their money. The haggler's discount came out of the traveller's full price; the broken shutter came out of the cook's wages; the singing at midnight was charged, quietly, to five men who never complained and never returned. The first innkeeper thought he was refusing nobody. He was refusing his best customers by proxy, one loud yes at a time.

The verse:

The wrong guest pays, and pays tonight,
Then costs you six who slept in fright.
So keep your rule where all can see,
And spare the room for those to be.

Until next time. Go and write your rule this week, four lines at most, and pin it where the ten o'clock version of you will have to read it.

P.S. And if the thought of turning trade away makes your stomach turn over, that is worth sitting with rather than arguing away. A business that cannot afford one no is not choosing its customers at all; it is being chosen. That is a crowd problem, and Letter No. 1 is where the old man keeps the cure.

Also in the archive: Notice at Michaelmas, The Crowded End and Hoyle at the Far End of the Market.