I think the post above by lagrippe is what #3 is getting at.
I, too, am skeptical. It seems that some people have learned that they can financially profit from making up such stories. The fact that KFC has offered to help out with medical bills makes me somewhat less skeptical, however that could simply be damage control. The speed at which social media can travel can inflict a lot of damage on innocent people because it preempts the ability to do fact-checking.
That being said, poor little girl. We have a little girl here in Ohio who was recently mauled by a Pit Bull. Her jaw was torn off her face. I’ll gladly donate to her medical fund, even without a real-or-imagined evil KFC employee as a catalyst.
I suspect the little girl was crying and was asked to leave because it was disturbing the other customers. Assumptions ensued. KFC is on the hook for asking her to leave and wants it off the front page.
I have no idea of the facts but the OP story sounds highly dubious, while this version fits precisely with my experience of some people. So when it comes to bets on which story turns out to be true, I know what I will have my money on.
And as to KFC’s apology and agreement to pay, you can’t determine anything by that. I have a few times in my career been advisor (in a legal capacity) to companies who have been in PR difficulty and have been present when they have received high powered PR advice. Experienced PR people roll their eyes and sneer at the very idea that actual facts have the key role to play in formulating an appropriate response by a corporation to a media crisis (and a social media crisis the more so, I suspect).
The gist of the advice I have heard is that a “corporation is an asshole” story fits all preconceptions and so will be run by media, and believed by the public. A “corporation is not actually an asshole” story does not fit any preconceptions and it’s hard to get journalists to even listen, let alone cover it, let alone have many people read the story or believe it. So the corporation is basically screwed, and is best off just swallowing their sense of justice, their pride, and their commitment to reason, and should just apologise profusely and do something warm hearted as fast as possible.
It sounds to me like KFC have followed a well formulated PR strategy but it doesn’t mean jack shit as far as the question of whether they actually did anything wrong is concerned.
Former fast food manager checking in.
“Some boneheaded counter-jockey” would not have the authority to kick someone out of the restaurant. That’s a management call, and I can’t imagine the PIC of any store I worked at doing something like that. I used to get complaints all the time from customers about other customers, and almost never was my response anything other than “That’s really none of our business/We can’t control customer behavior/We can’t kick someone out of the store because they cut you off at the drink machine” etc. I certainly wouldn’t have kicked someone out of the store for being ugly or gross to look at; if you’re a paying customer and you’re not actually doing something that actively disrupts business, then it’s not the restaurant staff’s job to babysit.
In every restaurant I’ve ever been in the back of, the only areas covered by video camera were the front counter (focused on the register drawers), the drive-thru register, the drive-thru exterior, and the back door exterior. Most of the customer area isn’t recorded, and in any event the recording is video-only; even if this event happened right at the front counter, all you’d be able to tell is that an employee spoke to the woman.
This sounds more in line with my personal experiences than the account being presented in the OP. As I mentioned above, I’ve dealt with a lot of customers who expected us to referee their petty disputes or punish another customer for their bad manners, and in some cases it can escalate when you refuse to take their side. I specifically recall one time I had to ask a woman to leave when she got angry that I wouldn’t kick out another customer who she thought had cut in front of her in line (which I didn’t see happen, and even if she had, it delayed her placing her order by about fifteen seconds tops anyway), and another customer who swore he’d never come to our restaurant again because there were too many birds in the parking lot (calm down Smapti, it’s just a bird, you don’t control the birds, you will someday, but not today) as if he expected me to stand in the parking lot with a BB gun and take pot shots at any offending crows eying his sack lunch greedily from their perch atop the public lamppost on the sidewalk adjoining our parking lot. There are some people out there who take “the customer is always right” way too far and have a greatly inflated expectation of how far a business is supposed to bend over backwards to cater to their whims, and it sounds like this might be one of those cases.
That being said, good on KFC for helping the kid’s family out with their medical bills.
This, 100%. Denials and/or verbal apologies won’t restore public respect for a corporation. KFC’s offer to assist with medical bills is the only thing they could have done that wouldn’t make them look like an asshole, regardless of what did or did not happen in that store. And given how much money they probably spend on advertising every year, $30K is a drop in the bucket.
Not to be too insensitive, but why? Did KFC maul her? Did KFC’s dog maul her? Did KFC have ANYTHING to do with her before this incident? Or were they just the poor schmucks with deep pockets that happened to be in the family’s line of sight?
Maybe KFC could pay my medical bills, too. Why not? What do they owe her that they don’t owe any random person? There are lots of people who had bad things happen to them. Should KFC help them all as well?
$30,000 is a small price for KFC to pay to deflect the possible negative publicity from this story, regardless of what did or didn’t happen in the restaurant.
There is the possibility that a KFC employee was an utter jerk to the little girl, or the girl’s grandmother and the company can be held accountable for the actions of an employee.
Granted, I think the employee should be held accountable, too, if that is what happened.
Given the way things work in the real world, it’s probably cheaper to give the kid $30k than to fight a lawsuit whether they win or not.
It happened in April. Her grandfather, the ex-husband of the grandmother who took her there, is in jail on child endangerment charges because these were dogs bred for fighting.
I, too wonder what the real story is on this. Her deformities aren’t that severe.
When I waitressed, I’ll never forget the man with no arms who ate with his feet, and the couple who brought in their severely disabled daughter who sat in a wheelchair, and they fed her off their own plates. An elderly couple nearby kept hissing, “That’s sickening. That’s disgraceful. People like that used to be put away.” :mad: I wanted to say, "She isn’t hurting you. If you don’t want to look at her, YOU leave.
Maybe she does have a feeding tube, but other stories said she can eat liquid or soft foods, like mashed potatoes which they said the grandmother was going to buy for her.
I also wonder why Grandma was taking her home from the hospital, and not her parents. 
It sounds like hush money to me too. :rolleyes:
“Cost of doing business?”
I guess there’s a reason I don’t run a large public corporation. Because, as heartless as the incident was, I still don’t think KFC owes her anything more than an apology, and firing the jerk who threw her out. Is the going rate for making a little girl cry $30K? Because no one was harmed physically.
I know I’m setting myself up to be accused of being a jerk. Maybe my bias is affecting my opinion? I suspect the incident did not go down as described, though of course I have no evidence to support that.
Maybe I just don’t want to live in a world where throwing money at problems to make them go away is the default position. If people weren’t so quick to judge (all corporations are evil! The family’s lying! fire up the Facebook troops!) maybe the world would be better, the right people would get helped, and the right people would get punished.
I don’t believe the incident happened as was reported either. However, KFC isn’t in the business of making moral stands. They’re in the business of making money and avoiding negative publicity and controversy helps when it comes to making money. $30,000 and an apology is a very small price to pay to avoid thousands of posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. saying stuff like “KFC throws poor disfigured 3 year-old-girl out of restaurant and calls her a liar!!!” and “Boycott KFC! KFC doesn’t allow injured children to eat in their restaurants!!!” etc., etc.
It would be too scary. Besides, I think someone may have thought this story was a joke because of the similarity between the words “scared” and “scared”.
I used to know all about homynoms and synonyms and other words like that. But I now can’t seem to remember what you call the two words “scared” and “scared”.
I also no longer think it’s at all amusing or interesting. IMO, it’s just a waste of human brain cells to give a shit about any of the fallout.
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but may have different meanings.[1] Thus homonyms are simultaneously homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of their pronunciation) and homophones (words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of their spelling). The state of being a homonym is called homonymy. Examples of homonyms are the pair stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/harass a person) and the pair left (past tense of leave) and left (opposite of right). A distinction is sometimes made between “true” homonyms, which are unrelated in origin, such as skate (glide on ice) and skate (the fish), and polysemous homonyms, or polysemes, which have a shared origin, such as mouth (of a river) and mouth (of an animal).[2][3]
In non-technical contexts, the term “homonym” may be used (somewhat confusingly) to refer to words that are either homographs or homophones.[1] In this looser sense, the word row (propel with oars) and row (argument) and row (a linear arrangement of seating) are considered homonyms, as are the words read (peruse) and reed (waterside plant).
A homonym
… is one of a group of words that share the same spelling or pronunciation (or both) but have different meanings. The state of being a homonym is called homonymy. Examples of homonyms are stalk (which can mean either part of a plant or to follow someone around) and the trio of words to, too and two (actually, to, to, too, too and two, being “for the purpose of” as in “to make it easier”, the opposite of “from”, also, excessively, and “2”, respectively). Some sources state that homonym meanings must be unrelated in origin (rather than just different). Thus right (correct) and right (opposed to left) would be polysemous (see below) and not be homonyms.
An antonym…
is a word or term which is opposite to another, such as flammable and non-flammable, as opposed to synonymous (ie, two words or terms having the same or nearly the same meaning, such as joyful and glad).
A synonym …
two words that can be interchanged in a context are said to be synonymous relative to that context Example: lawyer = attorney.
The word is homograph.
But one of the words you’re thinking of is spelled scarred.
This post is mostly beyond my ability to comprehend.
Two words that differ by a single phoneme are called “minimal pairs.” That’s what “scared” and “scarred” are.
The poster misspelled “scarred.” Substitute it for one of the “scareds” and it makes a little more sense.
It seems that some people have this perception that customer service people would be more likely to be rude, mean or inconsiderate to someone like the girl in the story. I have found in my own experiences that customer service people are, if anything more likely to have higher than average sympathy for the little girl. Most customer service people are pretty low level, low paid, and get basically shit on by customers, if not management all day while at work and oftentimes are told they are losers and flunkies when they are out of work. That type of experience tends to make one a little more sympathetic to the less fortunate. There are certainly rude customer service people, but they tend to be rude to certain types of people.