Understanding the psychology of elderly consumers is imperative due to the increase in the aging population (Sudbury and Simcock, 2009). Researchers have attempted to study the consumer behavior and consumption pattern of elderly consumers in the recent years (Kohijoki and Marjanen, 2013; Roschk et al., 2013; Omar et al., 2014). With the rapid increase in old age care homes, service quality issue has become very important. As a service provision, care homes for the elderly present unique challenges for managers as well as employees. In a context with highly demanding, yet vulnerable customers needing care for medical conditions, coupled with strict governmental oversight over operational issues, designing, planning and delivering, maintaining proper service quality is a major challenge for care home managers. Core service failure leads to greater increases in negative responses for satisfaction, emotional, and behavioral responses than supplementary service failure (Walton and Hume, 2012). Predictably, one of the most critical issues in such situations relates to staffing since caring for old people requires employees, such as nurses and other customer-facing staff to show high levels of empathy, concern and sacrifice. It goes without saying that treating old people who are often very vulnerable both physically and psychologically demands extraordinary levels of care, patience and mental toughness. On the other hand, the low-skilled nature of the job makes it difficult for the management to provide any extra benefits or incentives for its employees. Hence, such situations inevitably lead to higher levels of employee dissatisfaction and turnover. To compound the problem further, strict governmental regulations regarding conditions of employment and employee retrenchment combined with the difficulty in recruiting new staff due to the low wages, ties the hands of the management from taking actions against delinquent staff members. The combination of these micro and macro factors lead to a situation where there are highly dissatisfied, demotivated employees on the one side and a helpless management on the other side, trying their level best to provide higher levels of service quality. In fact as Sheridan et al.. (1992) explained, elderly care homes can be caught in a vicious cycle of ineffective staff and ineffective management leading to total collapse of the care home operation. In this paper we present the case study of a care home in France that illustrates the situation explained above. We examine the vicious circle of ineffectiveness and the resultant internal problems with reference to the theoretical as well as real life factors. We illustrate the challenges faced by the management in an effort to provide good quality service such as combat high employee absenteeism and turnover, motivate staff with low morale, and discourage delinquent employee behavior. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify factors that contribute to managerial difficulties in the context of elderly care homes, using the case study of an elderly care home in France, which clearly demonstrates an example of an extremely challenging environment as well as analyses of said challenges faced by the management. We aim to contribute to the literature by identifying and exploring the different dimensions of real life situation that involves both micro and macro factors. This will allow the provision of creative managerial recommendations to improve the quality of the service provided. The study adopts two frameworks: i) Heskett and Schlesinger (1994) framework of Service Profit Chain and ii) Rosenbaum (2006)’s Relational Third Place theory; to bind together our observations to develop the central theme of our study. We attempt to theorize the cause-effect linkage between the stumbling blocks, brand image and service quality by extending the above-mentioned works. In the ensuing sections we look at the literature relevant to this study and then present the key issues related to service quality at care homes.