We picked the wrong day to eat here and we will never eat here again. We've lived in Towne Lake for 25 years and always try to support local businesses. This restaurant sells certificates online for $15 that are worth $30 of food when redeemed. These are not FREE coupons. That's an important detail.
But these certificates made it more affordable for our family of 5 to eat here 5 times in the past 3 months. I always thought restaurants rely on repeat business to keep their doors open. But what occurred to me today (6th time) is some of the employees here (for whatever reasons) view customers differently who buy and use these certificates to eat here.
The 5 previous times we were charged the same $6.99 for either chicken or beef nachos. It's the price that's printed on the menu. Today we were charged $7.75 each for 5 orders of nachos with no explanation from our server. So when I went to check out and pay, I simply asked why we were charged more for the nachos this time. It seemed like a reasonable question to me.
Unfortunately, that one question made the two employees at the register angry. In fact, angry enough to lie to my face. One of them got a menu to show me that the $7.75 price was right for nachos, but the menu price was $6.99. So then the other employee tried to tell me that the $7.75 price included tax, which she knew was not true. And when I showed her the tax was added on at the bottom, she became even more angry.
The first employee then said they would give us the 76 cent "discount" off each of the 5 nachos, but they wouldn't be able to accept our "$30 of food for $15" certificate that I already purchased because they couldn't give us 2 discounts on the same ticket. I asked how charging us the price that is shown on the menu is somehow giving us a discount and the first employee threw up his hands and said, "I'm just a server" and "I'm done with you, bro" and walked off.
Then the second employee threatened to have me escorted outside for simply asking why we were being charged more than we have before and more than the printed menu price for our 5 nachos. Of course, that was my original question that was never really answered or all of this could've been avoided.
Then the second employee said she would change the price, after previously telling me they have a new system and the price we were charged is the right price and it couldn't be changed and even showed me the screen as if it was etched in stone. Apparently, the prices could've easily been changed the whole time and without conflict and drama. But the hilarious part is, while I was paying the $6.99 per nachos price, she looked at me with this scowl and said, "I'm making a phone call and we won't be accepting these certificates any longer" like that was supposed to hurt me or something.
I said, "You can run your business any way you want" and that's honestly how I feel. But I draw the line at treating me and my family like we're some kind of criminals because we purchase your $15 certificates online and then come in and redeem them and actually spend our hard-earned dollars in your restaurant. You should be thanking us.
The nice thing about Metro Atlanta is there are at least 10,000 restaurants that want you to come and spend your money with them and enjoy a good meal free of abuse. In fact, the food is good at this restaurant and the nice server who helped us last time wanted to take our food order and enter it in their system before the prices went up at 3pm. I even had a nice conversation with the owner previously who told us how they left another restaurant down the street to start this one.
What a shame that the same savings certificates that attracted us to this restaurant just 3 months ago are now responsible for us never going there again. And it's not because we weren't happy to use the certificates. It's because certain employees treated us differently, meaning worse, for using the certificates. Frankly, I'm too old to put up with ridiculousness like this when there are other local restaurants that welcome us as frequent customers. read more