Today my husband and I had to run errands while he was on lunch. Because we had a very limited time table, we chose to go to a local McDonald's with a drive through service. As we were crunched for time, I was constantly glancing at the clock while we waited in line. His lunch hour today was -way- early because of another person taking the afternoon off, and it was 10:40am when we got into the long drive through line.
The line moved fairly fast, which was nice, and by the time we came around to the payment window, there was only 1 car left in front of us, indicating that they were getting the people through the line quickly.
When it came to our turn, they handed us two drinks (we had our youngest daughter with us, so we needed her drink as well), and told us that the food we ordered needed to be made up, and to pull ahead.
By now, it was 10:45. At 10:53, a person came out, handed us a happy meal, and a bag of food. My husband got out of the van and went around the back to set my daughter up with her nuggets and apples, and I noticed immediately that our food was wrong. Instead of a 3 piece chicken selects, a 5 piece chicken selects, and 2 fries, we found a double cheeseburger, and a small fry.
I went inside with the wrong food, and my husband waited with the right food. This was now 10:55. I explained what had happened, or started to, but the girl cut me off by hollering back to the people on drive through that the order was messed up. A few minutes later, just shy of 11:00am, a girl told me they had to wait on the 5 piece chicken selects meal, but that a manager was writing me up a card for a free extra value meal.
Between 10:55 when I went in, and 11:05, no less than 3 separate employees asked me what was wrong with my meal, and what I ordered. At about 11:02, my husband came in- my daughter's meal was not nuggets (she went for the apples fist, and did not notice right off that she didn't have the nuggets), but was a cheeseburger instead. And there was no apple juice. So, I added that to the order of things I needed.
I didn't walk out of McDonald's until almost 10 minutes after 11- a full 30 minutes after pulling into the drive way for a quick drive through lunch to eat while we ran errands.
The staff was highly disorganized, with too many people all trying to work the same stations at the same time, which led to the confusion. Our meal was given to the people who had been behind us in line, while we got theirs. My husband joked when he saw them getting a meal walked out to the car with a happy meal that it was likely ours, but I said no, they're behind us, they probably only needed to wait for fries or something. He did watch them, though, as they opened the bags, and quickly drove off after finding that their smaller meal became a free bonus. :(
All in all, our time was wasted, the fries were cold by the time we were able to eat them, because when they "fixed" the meal, they put everything in the bag except the 5 piece chicken selects and let it sit for a few minutes while we waited for the others to be added.
They also failed to give us a receipt (it wasn't in the first bag, or the new bag, which means that claiming it to the McDonald's headquarters will be tricky), and upon driving down the road, they also shorted us 1 chicken selects. The whole reason I had to stand there waiting for 10 minutes in the building was that chicken selects part.
I was NOT happy when I left. If I had wanted to spend 30 minutes at McDonald's with my daughter, I'd have taken her to the one with the play place, not the one where we went to.
I had several people explain why it was taking so long, and 2 explain that our meals got switched around, but only the manager actually apologized for the fiasco.
And to boot, we didn't have time to run any errands during lunch today.
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