Terrible service seems to be the norm at most fast food and chain restaurants. Lately I’ve taken to writing letters of complaint and asking for refunds. I’m sick and tired of wasting money on what these places try to pass off as food.
<Total Hijack on the allergy issue> So, I have a second job as a chef. Mid level restaurant, nothing fancy. We get folks with allergies come in all of the time, and this scares the crap out of me.
Let me share a little secret with you. If you have a life threatening food allergy do not eat at a restaurant that has any trace of that allergen anywhere in the building. If someone, for example, asks for a hot fudge sunday with no nuts, the best that I can tell them is that there will not be any nuts deliberately in the food that I give them.
It will probably be ok assuming that the prep guy didn’t use peanut oil instead of canola when making the fudge because he has trouble reading English, assuming that I do not have some residual nut oil on my hands from the last one that I made that hand washing did not catch, assuming that the guy at the distributor washed the vat that he made the vanilla in 100% perfectly after making the rocky-road…. You get the idea.
If you think that doing anything but preparing your own food is not playing craps with your life, you are deluding yourself. <end hijack>
Over the summer, I worked at a family owned ice cream, burgers, and seafood place. The prices were outrageously high, but the service was awesome, and we’d have lines to the street for the better part of the day.
A cheeseburger (priced at $3.50), consists of cheese, meat, and bun. No condiments whatsoever, unless otherwise requested. All condiments were complimentary, except for lettuce and tomato, which was $1 extra. All of our menus clearly stated all of this.
One day, I had a middleaged woman order a burger to go
Me:What would you like on your burger Ma’am?
Middleaged Woman: Whatever comes on it
Me: All of our sandwiches come plain by default, we add condiments on request. We have ketchup, mustard, onions, relish, mayo, lettuce, tomato, cheese, honey mustard, and BBQ sauce available. Would you like any of these on your burger?
MAW: In that case, I’ll take pickles, onions, lettuce, and tomato
Me: We don’t have pickles, just relish. And just so you know, the lettuce and tomato is an added charge of $1, as the menu says right there. And you wanted that dry, no ketchup or anything?
MAW: Well, it comes with mayonaise, right?
Me: No Ma’am ,just what you request. We can add mayonaise if you like though. your total will be $4.75…
MAW: The sign says $3.50…
::sigh:: Some people just don’t listen…
I was eating @ an old fashioned burger place with my sister once and we watched a lady come in. She ordered a Bacon Cheeseburger without the bacon. Then she wanted a Cheeseburger without the cheese. I don’t think she was joking because she had a straight face on. Til this day it still puzzles me.
Don’t bacon cheeseburgers generally cost more than cheeseburgers, and cheeseburgers more than burgers? I wonder if they actually charged her more for ordering that way. If so, I wouldn’t blame them at all. It’s what she asked for.
People ordering cheeseburgers must explain why when I order a plain cheeseburger I get asked if that means I want a hamburger, or cheese but no condiments.
Don’t mind them asking though, tis better then them assuming. Of course there is one girl who argued with me over what I wanted on my burger, I have no clue what was up with that.
Of course if you want real fun beat the system, for instance go into Pizza Hut and order a pizza with pineapple and Canadian bacon, watch them try to put it down as a Hawaiian until you finally get it through to them that you aren’t gonna pay more for the name, that know you didn’t mean a Hawaiian pizza.
Something sometimes happens when you order a cheeseburger with bacon on it instead of a Bacon Cheeseburger.
When I went to the Subway in the train station in Vienna, the turkey sub that I always get here in the US came with ketchup on it. Not entirely unpleasant, but definately wierd and totally unexpected. (It’s not like I could be all that specific abotu what I wanted on my sandwitch, as the Subway guys didn’t speak a whole lot of English and there was kind of a line behind me, so I just said “Everything”.)
Ketchup.
This happened to my husband at a sub shop the other night - he ordered one sub for himself, then a veggie sub for me, and the guy was nearly debating with him over whether or not I would want onions on the sub. Finally my husband said, “If you put onions on it and she eats them, she will puke. She does not want onions.” Rather blunt (though true), but at least the guy shut up and didn’t add onions.
Assorted thoughts:
- I agree with Chimera: don’t go through the drive-thru if you’ve got to ask a lot of questions about the food. It’s not like the people behind you can change lines at that point.
I’m also not keen about when a van is in the line ahead of me, and the driver seems to be ordering for seven or eight passengers, but that’s another rant.
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There’s enough chains, these days, that it’s hard to know what’s standard in all of them. I was at a Checkers in FL the other day; they don’t have them up in DC. I almost forgot to order my burger with no mustard, something I don’t have to worry about at Wendy’s or BK.
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Audrey, McD’s used to be really unresponsive to doing foods any way besides their standard way. Even asking them to leave off a condiment entailed an extra five-minute wait. I can imagine how asking for something extra, not on the menu, would have freaked them out: they probably wouldn’t even know how to ring it up. Their commercials say you can now get your stuff the way you like it, but I have no idea how that plays out on the ground.
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friedo, you should offer a culinary tour of your neighborhood for the Dopefest this weekend! I’d be there in a heartbeat; fergit the dim sum.
A few years ago the wife and I were in Australia. We stopped for lunch and she went into a mom & pop kind of place to get a cheeseburger. It was HUGE! Beat the bejeebers out of what ever I was having. She took a big bite and got a strange look on her face. Everything included a quarter inch thick slice of purple, slimy beet. Which is probably the only thing in the world she won’t eat.
[brief hijack]
Why can’t fast food chains invent a keyboard or touch screen system for the drive-through so that customers could enter their own orders and make whatever special requests are allowed? Their food should be just the way they want it and waiting for them by the time they get to the little window.
[/brief hijack]
Why indeed? I think it would work inside as well. Especially now that fast food places are about to start taking credit cards, the machine could take your payment too.
Wawa does something similar to that, with sandwiches and subs and stuff. It does work well, and I just slide my debit card through to pay. No hassle, 5 minutes.
at McDonald’s they use to have 29 cent Hamburger Tuesdays and 39 cent Cheeseburger Wednesdays. Normally, a hamburger costs between 59 and 79 cents. So on Wednesdays, I always wanted to ask for a cheeseburger without the cheese, but never have the guts or the time to explain that to the nice order taker… and of course I had a friend in college who on 29 cent hamburger tuesdays always wanted a cheeseburger… it got to the point (we were ordering like 20 hamburgers for a group of friends) that we almost bought her a 16 pack of Kraft cheese to make her own…
but enough rambling for today…
(don’t get me started on trying to explain to Mickey D’s the concept of a Quarter Pounder without Cheese. Even with the Special Order sticker on it, 75% of the time you get the frickin cheese :smack: )
There’s a local place (wonderful burgers) where the Bacon Cheeseburger has many more condiments on it than the Cheeseburger (not just bacon, but other stuff). I go there far too often for my health. One day, I ordered, as usual, a bacon cheeseburger without anything on it. When they called me up to get my food, one of the managers, handed me my food, handed me some money, and said that they’d been overcharging me based on what I was actually getting, and from now on, I should order a cheeseburger - add bacon, rather than the bacon cheeseburger. (Which costs more than a cheeseburger, but less than the bacon cheeseburger)
I love that place.
Beetroot slices, pineapple rings, those are big deals here. Traditionally, homemade burgers all had those back when I was a kid (and I assume long before) but when McDonalds started putting its stamp on this part of the world, the homemade stuff started to emulate them, and thinned them down, removing the pineapple and beetroot stuff.
Well, soon enough they changed their minds again (took about 15 years though) and started putting the beetroot and pineapple options back in, which is often part of their selling point.
SO future travellers to Australia and New Zealand, don’t assume that our foods that appear to be similar to, or named the same as, your local counterpart, has the same contents.
(A Hot Dog in New Zealand, for example, may dumbfound you)
preach it, sister. I just cannot stomach processed American cheese like they use at McDs, so I have to have the cheese off, and though it’s gotten better than it used to be (in that they seem to get the lead out now and get me my cheeseless burger in less than a year) they still give me a weird look, and sometimes I get the cheese anyway. One time, they even inexplicably gave me a big mac instead. rrrr.
McDonald’s hires just about anybody because the turnover rate is so high, so you get a lot of dummies. There was one girl who would constantly come up to me with a handful of change and ask how much money it was.
Indygrrrl, I am positive it was a McD’s. I was fourteen, not four, and the Golden Arches are pretty memorable. 
Maybe people in The Hague have religious objections to pairing cheese with fish…I have no idea…but I promise, the BITCH refused to put cheese on my damn sandwich.
And I forget who posted it, but the part about McD’s not wanting to slow up their orders, etc., with special requests makes a lot of sense. As far as explaining her baffling behavior, anyway…this has been a mystery to me for ten years. sob And now I’ve bigger sob of gratitude SEEN THE LIGHT!
I don’t think, however, that I’ve ever ordered another fish sandwich at McD’s.
McDonalds, and other worldwide fast food chains, may appear to be standard around the world, but I think you’ll find that they are not. cf Pulp Fiction.
They’ll have variations in contents, in names, in combo packages. Heck, I can’t even get banana flavoured thickshakes at McD’s here, and they’re everywhere back home in NZ.