Try a Little (Chicken) Tender-ness
I’ve had a run of bad luck with carry-out over the last few months. Maybe it’s always been this way and I’m only noticing now because, with dine-in closed for most of the past almost four months, I’m eating more carry-out than I typically do. I won’t mention the establishments, because that isn’t really that important to the story.
The first time happened when I ordered a plain chicken sandwich, drove to a nearby place to eat, and found that there was mayo on my sandwich. I hate mayo. A few weeks later, I ordered a four-strip chicken strip basket with fries, but instead, I received a three-strip basket with cheese curds. I hate cheese curds. Just a week later, I ordered vanilla ice cream with M&Ms, but got chocolate. I hate chocolate ice cream. Finally, just this week I ordered a sandwich with white bread but was given wheat bread instead. And, yes, I hate wheat bread.
I take some blame since I drove away without checking my order each of those times. I get anxious when I’m sitting at the window with cars lined up behind me. I know I could have pulled over in the parking lot, but then I would have had to wait in line again since most of these occurred before dine-in had opened up again. I know you’re also probably thinking that I’m really picky, and you might be right there too. But shouldn’t I be able to get what I ordered?
What’s going on here? Well, these places were extremely busy and the cooks were probably rushed, so mistakes could happen because of a lack of attention to detail. However, only in the case of my plain sandwich was it something different than what someone might typically order. So that means that there must be a lot of wrong orders going out.
I think that points to the bigger issue. They just don’t care if some mistakes are made. I worked at Pizza Hut when I was in high school. It’s not exactly fast food, but it’s similar. I know when things would get busy and I would just want to throw the orders together as fast as I could so I could get caught up and relax a little. I wasn’t thinking about making mistakes, because I figured it would be good enough in most cases.
What if, instead, I had been really empathetic about my customer and put myself in their shoes. It doesn’t take much to realize that it sucks to be disappointed in something you ordered. I might have taken a few extra seconds to make sure the orders were right if I had thought about it. Instead, I was more concerned with myself and wanting to get to a point where I could relax.
I don’t want to blame this all on youth, but studies show that empathy is newly developing in teens. While empathy in girls generally starts developing at around the age of 13, it takes boys until 15 to start seeing improvement. In most cases. I bet with a little extra empathy, a lot fewer mistakes would be made at the carry-out window, which would make me, and I’m sure many others, very happy.
