This business owner shut down a negative TripAdvisor review with an exact breakdown of what it costs to run a business

If you end up traveling to York, England, you may very well stop in Bennet’s Cafe & Bistro. After all, it has over 400 “excellent” ratings on TripAdvisor with an average rating of 4.5 stars, and it’s ranked #11 out of 696 restaurants in the city. But when Hannah C. paid it a visit, she was not pleased, and she decided to vent her pure unadulterated anger in a nasty review on the cafe’s TripAdvisor page.

The review, which has since been taken down, was entitled “Over-priced and very rude staff,” according to Mashable. Her fury can be traced back to a cup of hot lemon water. Yep.

Hannah, who says was on a “tight budget,” called the place “absolutely awful” and “dreadful” due to the fact that her hot water and lemon did not arrive on time with her friends’ cake and drinks. “I was then charged £2 for the hot water and a thin slice of lemon,” she wrote. “When I asked why I was being charged so much for some water the waiter rudely said ‘well, do you know how much a lemon costs?’ Yes, its definitely not £2.”

“He then went on to wrongly inform me that a ‘pot of tea for one’ (which is what I was charged for) is the same price as a lemon,” she continued. “To show just how ridiculous this is, my friend ordered a slice of chocolate cake which was £1.90.”

Then, she concluded the post by claiming the waiter should lose his job. Little did she know that the manager was fully prepared with a response that would blow hers out of the (lemon) water. “I’m sorry that you feel that you were ‘ripped off’ and I’ll try to explain why you weren’t,” he started:

But that’s not all. He went on to highlight that the cost of running a business, including rent, utilities, and bank charges, works out to be approximately £27.50 per hour. Add in the costs of paying his colleagues a “decent living wage,” it’s approximately £40 per hour “[That’s] 67p per minute, meaning that the cost of providing you with 2-3 minutes of service was £1.34 – £2.00. Then the government add on VAT at 20% which. . . to between £1.60 and £2.40,” he wrote.

He highlighted that it’s not the ingredients that determine the cost, but the facilities. “I accept that it makes the price of a cuppa in a city centre cafe look expensive compared to the one you make at home but unfortunately that’s the cruel reality of life,” he concluded. “. . . Perhaps, the rudeness that you perceived in me was triggered by the disrespect that I perceived in you by your presumption that you could use our facilities and be waited on for free.”

Can someone give that guy a mic to drop? Hannah, maybe you should just make your lemon water at home next time.

(Image via Twitter.)