Kustomer Kare at Krystal

I'm going to go ahead and reveal a deep dark secret.
I love the Krystal - those tiny little square burgers whose "meat" is cut thinner the average McDonald's coupon.
I grew up going to Krystal. I can remember when you could get a great breakfast a Krystal (scrambled eggs, grits, toast and juice), not to mention these killer cake donuts (plain, chocolate and vanilla icing). Once I came out of a doctors appointment in downtown Atlanta and went to a corner Krystal on Peachtree and soemthing like 16th Street (near a theatre where Alice Kooper used to play - and yes, that's "Kooper" with a "K") for a donut.
Doctors' appointments always stress me out, requiring comfort food. I sat at the corner of the counter and ordered three chocolate-covered cake donuts and a Coke. This beat-up, homeless-looking woman sat next to me and proceeded to tell me how wonderful she was sure my life was. I was 16 and not sure what her expectation of me was, so I bought three donuts for her. True charity - for me - began at Krystal!
I once won a Krystal-eating contest by downing something like 28 of those little burgers within the prescribed time line, beating the four other competitors at some long-forgotten friend's high school birthday party. I think I'd have eaten more, but they were all gone and I had the most of those empty square cartons they've always come in.
Oh, we made fun of Krystal. We laughingly called those burgers all kinds of names - "gut bombs" always seemed the most appropriate - but it didn't stop us from going on a regular basis.
What is it about a Krystal? Maybe the tiny cooked onions that permeated the beef and bread - aw, heck, let's be honest: if I was any kind of real connoisseur of food, I'd probably not be a Krystal lover. I don't know what it is that makes the little suckers so tasty, but they are.
However, I do find it amusing that for all the abuse Krystal's have taken over the years, you can now go to fancier restaurants and they serve tiny burgers they call "sliders" which are simply up-scale Krystals.
But this isn't really supposed to be about Krystals.
This is about my recent stop at a Krystal in Hattiesburg.
Just for the record, it's the one right off Highway 49, on the south side of I-59, on an access road that makes it hard to see if you don't know it's there.
I stopped in about 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon because I'd been in Jackson attending an event at which lunch was served but the lines were so long I didn't wait. Another of my sometimes unfortunate habits is that if I'm not hungry, I simply forget to eat - and then when I do get hungry, I am tempted to eat way too much.
So by the time I got hungry, I knew from past travels I was approaching the Krystal. I'd stopped there many times on my way from Birmingham to Baton Rouge or New Orleans for games and tournaments.
So here it was mid-afternoon, well after the lunch rush. In fact, they were out of sweet tea, which is key to the point of my story (if there even is one; even I'm beginning to wonder).
I went inside, placed my order with a rather bored looking girl behind the counter, and everything was normal.
But the manager was there. He greeted me when he saw me. While the girl behind the counter acted kind of bored, he jumped to fill my order. He quickly went about starting a new batch of iced tea.
Realizing it was going to take a few minutes, I said, "Hey, I'll just take a Diet Coke."
"Are you sure?" the manager said. "This will only take a few minutes."
"I know," I said. "But you can just give me a Diet Coke and I'll be on my way."
The counter girl went to get a small cup (which is what I ordered), and I heard the manager lean over and say, "Give him a large."
Now, that may not seem like a big deal. But for some reason, it really struck a chord with me.
Here was a restaurant that couldn't fill my order exactly as I wanted it, was scrambling to fill it for me in a timely manner, and when I made a change based on their not being able to fill my order, upgraded my order - so to speak - without even telling me or making a show of it.
That's called customer service.
I know increasing the size of a drink from small to large isn't that big a deal, and certainly didn't cost anyone a bunch of money. But I appreciated that the manager realized they were not able to fill my order exactly as I wanted and attempted to reward me for MY trouble.
Compare that to breakfast at the Hilton in Jackson where the wait staff was slow, got my friends' order wrong, didn't seem to care that it took too long to fill the order, and then when I went over to get a biscuit off the breakfast buffet because I was tired of waiting wanted to charge me $3.50 for one biscuit! (Although, I must admit, it was a very good biscuit.)
It's a sad state of affairs that the attitude of the manager of the Krystal in Hattiesburg screamed "we care about you and want to make you happy" while the Hilton was "why didn't you just order from the buffet to start with and save us all a lot of time and trouble."
It's nice to know that somewhere, you can still find a place that recognizes the customer doesn't have to come to your place of business and doesn't have to spend money in your establishment, so that when someone does walk in the door they want to make the customer feel like getting the order right - or making it right - matters.
Needless to say, I'll stop at that Krystal again.
But then, let's be honest.
I probably would have anyway.
Those are still the best little gut-bombs on the planet!