Corporate term: “Curry House Flower”

Definition:

A “curry house flower” is an item that was once only an extra to a process, but becomes mandatory to retain the customers satisfaction.

This is a really old one that I hadn’t had cause to dredge up for years.
A “curry house flower” comes from a scenario that was explained to me at General Electric back in the 90s. its a occasional gift to go above and beyond for a customer. But if given too often becomes an entitlement when it has no relevance to the core deliverable.

In this scenario, you go to your favourite curry house and order your favourite curry, you’re walking out perfectly satisfied with the transaction and looking forward to your food when they present you with a flower at the door to take back to your loved one.
You’re really pleased with this gift, it has nothing to do with the curry but it’s nice to have. The next time you go for a curry, the same thing happens, and you come back with both the curry and the flower, this continues two or three more times.

Then they stop giving you the flower, for whatever reason. You come home with only the curry and you’re now dissatisfied with the curry house.
You form a negative opinion on it. You still have an amazing curry and your original purpose in going there is still being achieved, but now you’re unhappy because you didn’t get your freebee.
In the corporate world, this is often seen in terms of large third parties who build gigantic and beautiful weekly PowerPoint status reports, they have dedicated people spending ages on them, and the cost is not seen because its a tiny line item in a gigantic project.
Managers get used to these beautiful, maximum effort presentations on what is a simple status report. but if they stop getting them because they have moved to another vendor or gone internal, or there’s a budget cut.
They become massively dissatisfied with the delivery on the project because they have not received a fancy gift with what is a well running project.