Sometimes being a hormonal pregnant woman pays off…

A couple of weeks ago, I was being my pregnant self and took a nap too late in the day, causing me to sleep through the time-frame I’m supposed to be making dinner in. I wasn’t too upset when I woke up because I had been craving Chili’s all day anyway, so I decided we’d just order To Go from them for dinner instead.

We’ve done this multiple times before, and it’s generally a pretty easy process. Order online (or by calling them), wait about 10-20 minutes, pay and pick up your food. Pretty simple.
Well, we did that. When we got to the restaurant (which is literally about 5 minutes from our apartment), 20 minutes after we’d ordered, they STILL didn’t have our food ready. Not a BIG deal, that’s happened before.

*A portion of this story is coming from Dallas’s perspective, since was not the one to actually go in and pick up our order*

Dallas explained to me when he FINALLY brought the food to the car (15 minutes AFTER the 20 minute waiting period), that the girl in there didn’t seem to know what was going on. He said he THOUGHT he saw our order sitting there, ready to go, the ENTIRE time he was standing in there, but she was too busy on the phone for 15 MINUTES to hand it to him.
He said that eventually, an order was brought out, and I guess that was our order because that was the one they handed to us. All this time, it hadn’t actually been ready.

”Oh well” I thought. “At least it will be warm.” Now here’s our dumb move. We didn’t check the bag. We were so miffed about having to wait so long, we were just happy to grab our food and get home to eat it.

Well, we got home, pulled all the food out, and I opened the containers. Not. Our. Food.

Yeah.

Literally at that exact same moment, Dallas’s phone rang – it was Chili’s. They mixed up our order and now we needed to go back to get our right order.

At this point, I was furious. So we drove back, and Dallas went in and switched the bags.
First, the lady asked him if he had eaten any of the order we were returning. Ummm, no? But why does that matter? Are you really going to give these other people their order cold now? Seriously?
Second, they gave us our original order. I mean ORIGINAL order. Yeah, the bag that HAD been sitting on the counter the whole time Dallas was in there. It was now an HOUR after we should have been able to originally pick it up. You can imagine, VERY cold food. VERY crappy food. VERY angry pregnant lady.

I told Dallas I probably should’ve been the one to go in and switch the orders because I was the angry pregnant lady and maybe could’ve gotten our food free. At least I could’ve made them cook us new food if anything. But it was after the fact and I didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Now here’s a wonderful thing Chili’s does. On their receipts, they give you the option to take a survey online. I ALWAYS take advantage of this, regardless of how the visit went – good or bad- I do it.

But let me tell you people, if you DO have a bad experience anywhere, TELL THEM SOMEHOW!
The survey gave me the option to describe my experience in detail, since I was giving them such horrible ratings on everything. So I told them the whole story and selected the option to have someone contact me about it.

That was what was in the mail on Saturday. An apology letter from their headquarters, explaining they were forwarding my story on to the store manager for reprimanding and training purposes. Also included with the letter was this:



Yup, those are Chili bucks. They reimbursed us the approximate amount we spent on their food that night. When a company is willing to go this far to make things right, I’ll give them a second chance.
I’m impressed with Chili’s now.
Just not so much with certain employees at a certain Louisiana locations!