Red Rooster Whinge

To whom it may concern,

On Saturday the 24th June at around 11.30am, myself and two friends decided we would pull in to you Alphington store drivethru. This was the beginning of terrible experience of epic proportions.

Upon entering the drivethru and ordering our meal, the girl was struggling from the onset. It seems she had great difficulty in putting together an order consisting of a quarter chicken and chips, a Flaava and a Portuguese chicken meal. Now, for someone who is “trained” to do this job, I wouldn’t have thought that would be too difficult a task. I was wrong. Once we managed to get over that little hurdle, we proceeded to sit there waiting for our meal for nearly fifteen minutes. Without being unfair, I do understand that a little waiting time may be required, but for a fast food outlet, that was absolutely RIDICULOUS!

Finally when our food had been fed, grown, plucked, cooked and served to us without even the slightest apology from your booth operator, we went on our way. About 3km down the road when I had gotten everything out of the bag, I realised that my order was incorrect. I found this most surprising really, considering the amount of time it took to order. You would think they would have had time to double and triple check it. Nevertheless, we proceeded to do a u-turn and head back to the store in a less than pleased manner, as you would imagine. Here is where the experience takes a nasty down slope.

As I approached the young lady who served us and presented her with our dilemma, anyone would have thought that I had just told her that her dog had died. The look of bewilderment on her face was second to none. Upon asking for our order to be rectified and having her stare blankly at us, the manager poked her head out from the back and most abruptly asked, or should I say stated, “What’s the problem?” After explaining what had occurred and not even the littlest skerrick of customer service, I was forced to ask where my Portuguese chicken was. The answer I received was nothing short of amazing. The manager’s reply, and I quote, “Its still cooking”. Firstly, I found that particularly hard to believe due to the fact it had been over 20 minutes by then and what I found even harder to swallow, was that fact I had ALREADY LEFT THE STORE!! If that was not shocking enough, your manager proceeded to turn around and say, in an excessively rude tone, and I quote once again, “Well, do you want it or not?”

After all of this, I thought it can’t possibly get any worse. I was wrong once again. All I wanted was the order I had asked for, so I posed the question of how long it would be. The reply I received left me flabbergasted. Your extremely bad mannered, un-customer service orientated manager told me it would be another 10 MINUTES!!! If she was intentionally trying to piss me off, she succeeded, with honours. I was left with no alternative but to ask for my money to be returned and promptly left the store, hungry and need I say, horrendously annoyed.

Since you have provided a forum for your customers to contact you about their experiences, I have clearly chosen to do so. I feel I have been subjected to a most harrowing experience at your store, one of which I should not have been presented with in the first place, and one that no other should have to go through. If this is the way you are going to conduct yourselves, regardless of my annoyance, it is clear to me that you will not survive for much longer. I would like to have said that the experience had left nothing but a bad taste in my mouth but unfortunately I did not get to put anything in there, due to the fact that it seemed impossible to actually get served any food in a REASONABLE amount of time and in a REASONABLE manner. In conclusion, Saturday the 24th of June was the last time I will have entered your Alphington store. To be totally honest, I would rather spend an afternoon, sticking needles in my eyes than be subjected to that kind of torture again. Never have I been on the end of such a displeasing set of circumstances when ordering fast food.

Some sort of a reply to this would be appreciated, if it’s not too much trouble.