Being so close to a Vietnamese business has been an eye opener.

To quickly recap, The Cart, a bakery, sandwich delivery, coffee shop etc is my wife’s place.  She was originally in partnership with a very good and old friend who sadly died.  She took it on and my assistance has been minimal – just a little bit of marketing here and there.

Vietnam is just so entrepreneurial that it’s easy to believe that doing business isn’t hard but it is.  The very biggest problem is that your building can be taken away from you at a moment’s notice by the landlord.  Build up a business and the plot becomes more valuable and you, seemingly, have more money to extract.  Often too much of a temptation for a property owner.

Where do you start after that?

Recruitment is a nightmare in Hanoi.  Anyone working in retail or hospitality will tell you the same. It’s hard enough to find people, even harder to retain them.

Decent kitchen equipment has to be imported.  At Christmas we lugged back at 10 kilo juicer, paying 100 euros extra baggage for the privilege.  It effectively added 30% to its price.  We’ve travelled to Bangkok just to buy coffee cups.

Lose electricity for the day and half of what you can offer the customer is gone – not to mention the stock in the fridge than can be damaged.

In the rainy season a downpour can leave the whole place underwater. Constant building work in their alley, as in any other in Hanoi, means it’s difficult to keep the place free from dirt and dust.

In a wider business context there are tax shakedowns – a set amount regardless of income.  Inflation is currently so rampant that while turnover is going up, profits are going down.  Butter, a key ingredient of cakes, pies, pasties etc is now so valuable that blocks of the stuff in supermarkets have security tags. I kid you not.

Next week petrol goes up 24%. The Cart offers free delivery.

Over the near three years my wife has been in business she has built up an excellent staff.  She had no intention of making it a family business but turned to two of her sisters when she failed to be able to recruit elsewhere.  They have done her proud.

Alongside her another member of staff, who has long worked with my wife, has become family.

The newcomer is the young man who came in to do delivery.  Unlike others before him he has stuck.  He wants more money and more responsibility.  He’ll get both in time.

Once when they had staffing issues I took a turn answering the phones. I was worse than hopeless. It turned out that so many of their customers were regulars that names and addresses were hardly needed when ordering lunchtime deliveries.

Teachers, office workers, NGO employees rang expecting to speak to my extremely capable wife and instead they got me, asking them to say that again or, worse still, spell it out.

But now we’ve reached a point where my wife no longer needs to put the pies in the oven herself at 7am as she can trust staff to open up for her.  Just as well because when I get home in the evening she’s doing the books, or looking over recipes for the next day’s specials or chopping up veggies for soup.

Those regulars are a loyal bunch but I’ve also heard Loan and her sisters tell some horrific tales of customers.

One guy requests delivery across town and then regularly asks for a discount of a couple of thousand Dong once they arrive. On one occasion he swore poverty despite the fact that they could see the 100,000 Dong notes in his wallet.

Once my wife’s sister climbed up a dozen floors to deliver to an apartment because power meant the lifts weren’t working.  A tip would have been nice. Thanks would have been great. They complained she was late.

It’s a successful business, although you could argue that it makes my wife a reasonable local living rather than an “international” one.  It’s the kind of money volunteers would refer to as a stipend.

Personally I love the place.  Now I’m working I miss mid morning coffees there.  I miss being a customer rather than the bosses’ husband. Real customers get priority – I just get in the way.

For my wife there’s been no doubting the single hardest thing to deal with and that has been the New Hanoian.  I say that despite knowing and liking the guys who set up the site and also realising that publicitywise The Cart has benefited far more than it has suffered.

When one reviewer said they had been in with their whole family and ordered meals and drinks and found, apparently, nothing was edible we were flabbergasted – not least because surely staff would remember that many left platefuls.  We contacted them, they said perhaps it wasn’t last week after all.  Maybe it was last month or the month before that.

Someone who didn’t know last weekend from three months earlier still apparently remembered enough details to publicly trash the place.  And yet we still couldn’t work out when she might have eaten there.  But the one star damning review remains.

One guy gave us one star because we wouldn’t deliver him a single $2 pie 5KMs to his house.  Our website says we don’t do that – if we did we’d be out of business by now.  But the review remains.

We always used to write to the negative reviews to try and explain and or apologise.  We got the impression that they were embarrassed that we even noticed as all but one didn’t write back.  I assume they thought that their criticism was playing to an expat crowd and that Vietnamese owners wouldn’t ever know – let alone call them on it.

Most recently someone who “knows a thing or two about falafels” because, apparently, he was from New York, slated The Cart version.  We’d just added it permanently to the menu by genuinely popular request. It was gratifying when a regular suggested online that the original reviewer might be better off going back to New York.

Not that all less than positive reviews are unwarranted.  We’re in the process of ordering new covers for the well-used furniture after an New Hanoian complained about our “cozy room”. They were right, it was looking a little shabby.

One reviewer gave us one out of five because our cakes weren’t as good as the (five star) Metropole. Expats can be brutal. To my mind we are so overly respectfully treated here that it’s easy to forget we aren’t experts at everything. My wife hates the fact that reviews regularly suggest that western entrepreneurs “deserve support” while Vietnamese aren’t afforded such a courtesy.

Despite all of the above The Cart averages a very solid four of of five and currently nestles at a very respectable 11th out of nearly 300 cafes listed throughout Hanoi.  The Cart has some very very good reviews including one from me – back when I was just a customer who liked the look of the owner (and her cakes).

But we know it’s not for everyone.  It’s cheap, fresh food, simply done, with little pretension. That is all.

I try to remind my wife that the places we like and frequent are often way below us on this league table and  come in for even worse hammerings than us.

Like pretty much every expat in town I find the New Hanoian addictive reading, incredibly useful and frequently maddening.  I used to review regularly, even gaining “elite status”.  However since then I have seen tears, near-sackings, upset and whole weeks lost trying to get to the bottom of just why would someone say that – as a result of reviews.  Well, I’ve lost the will to do that to anyone else.

After a hard week my wife would be in pieces from a review.  I’d try to calm and reassure her despite being furious myself. I know the arguments in favour of it but it doesn’t stop it hurting. We reached a point where even positive reviews were a double edged sword because they’d inevitably spur someone else to mark us down.  Perhaps they wanted to represent themselves as having higher standards than the previous reviewer.

One expat entrepreneur  told me about his surprise and horror at being reviewed in this way.

“I’m not an actor,” he said. “I just want to run a shop.”

Even in this social media, peer-reviewing world – it’s a thought that has stayed with me.

Business isn’t easy.  Not here, not anywhere.

But The Cart goes on.

Update: As the lunacy surrounding the issue posted at the top of the blog continues and as allegations become increasingly deranged (on whichever site) I’m switching off comments on this post as the last thing I want is for it to become another place for for and against factions to battle. Hopefully I can switch them on again once this blows over.