Lawyer Sent Demand Letter Over $2.25 Bowl Of Soup -- And He Was Right To Do It
Lawyer who threatened restaurant over $2.25 bowl of soup was right and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Texas lawyer ordering at local restaurant.
Oh local restaurateur, you done did it this time! You jerked around the wrong customer thinking you could get away with it. You thought no one was willing to make a case out of getting swindled out of a couple bucks, eh? Well, you’ve never counted on dealing with Dwain Downing!
Dwain Downing is a Texas lawyer — because obviously he’s a Texas lawyer — who wasn’t going to take his lunch sitting down. Well, he probably does take his lunch sitting down, but figuratively speaking I mean. He wrote a demand letter to Our Place Restaurant, a local chain with two DFW-area locations, when he ordered their $7.95 Saturday Special and the eatery stiffed him his promised cup of soup.
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The letter went viral over the weekend, and Downing has backed away from his tough letter after most of the media painted this as the case of a hyperlitigious jerk. And that’s too bad, because in a world of overly aggressive lawyers, this is one instance where he was completely and utterly right. Where he did what all lawyers aspire — somewhere in their soulpit — to do: stick up for the little guy.
The story begins with the Saturday Special, which comes with one entrée — might I suggest the Chicken Fried Steak — and some sides. According to the Our Place menu:
Served with 2 Sides & Our home made Rolls, cornbread with Honey Butter.
All Specials Include a cup of our home made soup*.
Additional Sides are an Extra 2.25 Each
*while supplies last, no substitutions
I suspect that footnote is a new addition in response to Downing’s letter. Because Downing never got his cup of soup:
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After I made the order, I was told by the server that you were out of soup. I asked the server for either a discount off the price or another side. She said that you, the owner, refuse to allow any change or discounted price. The onsite manager came over and verified that this was your policy.
The menu is an offer for a contract by you. I accepted the offer. This action by you and I created a binding contract which is legally enforceable in a court of law. You then breached the contract by not providing the soup as promised by you on the menu.
Assuming the footnote on Our Place’s website is, in fact, a recent addition, then the law would seem to be on Downing’s side. Texas law describes menus as forming a contractual relationship with an implied warranty of consumability.
However, as with most legal conflicts, the real question here was “why was this even happening?” Have basic standards of customer service fallen so low at the corporate chain family feedbag? It’s a pretty fundamental concept: if you advertise that you provide an absolutely obscene amount of food for $7.95, and then stiff the customer on one of the sides, then you make some kind of accommodation. The marginal cost of giving the customer a double-order of fries is almost nil. Inviting a public relations s**tstorm over $2.25 is simply bad business. You may not like giving in to a customer, but hold your nose and eat your broccoli (another side you could have given Downing).
Yes, Downing probably could have sucked up the $2.25 and gone without. But Our Place is the sort of bland, inconsiderate food-and-drink platform disguising itself as a “restaurant” that crowds out competition by offering its lowest common denominator fare at such ridiculously low prices that it develops a parasitic relationship with poor and lower-middle-class diners (per capita income in Mansfield, Texas — the location Downing visited — is $34,103/year) who eat its heart-clogging offerings because it’s one of the few affordable meals in their immediate area. There are a lot of people ordering the $7.95 special because that’s the budget-conscious way they’ve found to eat. Taking $2.25 of food out of their mouths and still charging them for it is low.
Moreover, responding to this by playing lawyerball with the menu only shows the whole world that the establishment is committed to throwing the customers under a bus, or worse, confirms that “running out of soup” is part of a “bait and switch” business plan to maximize profit on the Weekly Special. In either event, the restaurant should just give customers some more dinner rolls and call it a day.
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Downing’s letter sought $2.25 in damages, obviously, and $250 in attorney’s fees for the cost of preparing and sending the demand letter. There’s something magical about attorney’s fees more than 100-fold greater than the value of the suit itself. Still, even with fees, it’s small potatoes (another side Our Place could have offered) compared to having this case plastered across American media.
But hands down the best line in the demand letter was Downing’s warning that, if the restaurant failed to comply within 10 days, they ran the risk of treble damages.
That’s right — $6.75 f**kos!
Now Downing is backing away, and we’re all worse off for it. Once again, the anti-lawyer bias in America — that the profession admittedly contributes to often — has turned public sentiment away from blaming a business taking advantage of its poor customers and shamed an attorney for daring to call out even a tiny injustice.
(The full demand letter is available on the next page.)
