Screw Freebirds, or, Why It's Okay to Get Angry

When burritos first came out as another option for fast food, I was thrilled.  The idea seemed perfect to me.  A burrito with the right ingredients is way healthier than most of the other options.  Plus, it tasted good.  For a while there I even daydreamed about opening my own burrito chain.  It was going to be called "Wrapido."  I thought burritos were the wave of the future.  I sampled most of the chains that came on the scene.  Freebirds, Chipotle, Mission Burrito and a few independents.  Freebirds became my favorite.  First and foremost, their ingredients were the best.  All of the veggies appeared to be prepped that day, the cuts of meat were generally better than the competition, they had several different flavors of tortillas - flour, wheat, cayenne and spinach - and sensible menu options.  Plus, I liked the fact that Freebirds was staffed with slacker college kids.  They were cool, you know, just doing their thing.  They seemed to be having fun together too.  I was already out of college so I got to relive it a little every time I went in there.  My only real beef with Freebirds, until recently, was the fact that their portion sizes were ridiculously large.  They had Regular, Monster and Super Monster.  Even the Regular was enormous.  I think food businesses that encourage gluttony suck.  But then they came out with the Half Bird, which used the same size tortilla as the Regular size, but with smaller portions of ingredients.  This made the perfect size for me and it was the only size I ever ordered.  Plus, it was the best value, which is a big deal to me too.  Quality, healthy, good-tasting fresh ingredients in a sensible portion and good value - I was very pleased.

Then the wheels started coming off.  I would order a Half Bird and every single time they would make a Regular size.  Then I would have to be "that guy" and tell the person at the register that they had screwed up my order when I asked for a Half Bird.  Their solution 100% of the time was to simply charge me for a Half Bird.  That only solved half the problem though.  I still had this enormous portion.  No big deal right?  Well, right, except that I don't like wasting food, so most of the time I would finish the whole thing and feel like a glutton. 

After the first five or six times this happened, I started to notice something else.  If you've ever been to Freebirds, you know how the line works with the burrito makers cycling from the end of the prep line to the beginning.  The process starts when the burrito maker greets you (usually with a slightly hip greeting - "What's up, man?  What can I getcha?").  Cool.  So you tell them, "I'll have a Half Bird on cayenne."  They grab the tortilla and put it in the steamer and ask you if you want rice and cheese, what kind of cheese and if you want black, refried or charro beans.  I would always tell them yes to rice and cheese.  Jack cheese.  Black beans.  And every single time they would pull my tortilla out of the steamer a few seconds later, walk to the rice and cheese and, having forgotten what I'd just told them, say "I'm sorry, did you want rice and cheese?"  And we'd go through the whole thing again.  I got very close to changing this inevitable routine by just telling them I'd wait until after they were done steaming the tortilla to tell them about the rice and cheese, what kind of cheese and what kind of beans when they asked.  In fact, I think I did that once.  Of course, then I'm a dick, right?  And in the psuedo-cool environment of Freebirds, that's just not cool.  Right?

The really shitty thing is that I GET why they don't remember what I said ten seconds prior.  The human brain is equipped to keep certain bits of trivial information in extreme short term memory and then purge them pretty quickly.  That way, you are not storing useless information in long-term memory.  This is why I, and lots of other people, are bad with names.  You meet a lot of people.  You only need to remember a few of their names.  You purge most of them and it's hard to get your brain to distinguish the memorable from the purgeable.  The burrito makers hear hundreds or thousands of orders and it's not necessary to keep them in short term memory for more than a few seconds.  In fact, if you get a burrito maker who tries to commit the orders to long term memory, that person would be storing and remembering a lot of useless information, probably at the exclusion of some other shit that they really do need to remember.  Imagine it like this:  it's important (if you are a guy in a heterosexual marriage) to remember your anniversary date.  You've only got one anniversary date, it's important, you commit it to long-term memory and you remember it every year, presumably.  Imagine if you'd been married 5 times.  Gets a little harder to remember wife #5's anniversary date, doesn't it?  Now extrapolate that to hundreds and thousands of bits of similar information and you see how it works.  So the solution, burrito makers of the world, is to ASK THE FUCKING QUESTION CLOSER IN TIME TO WHEN YOU NEED THE INFORMATION. 

I also GET why they ask when they do, even though they are wrong to do so.  They have just greeted you; in a "cool" way at that.  There would be an uncomfortable silence between you and the person you are now "cool" with if you didn't say something while you were steaming the tortilla, right?  So they use the questions about the rest of the order as a gap filler.  (Incidentally, this probably adds further to the difficulty in remembering the answers since it is essentially the equivalent of meaningless small talk.  We don't store meaningless small talk in our brains for very long.)  The reason they are wrong is that small talk in this situation is unnecessary.  I'm ordering food at a fast food restaurant.  That's it.  You might be slightly amusing to me with your witty nametag, nose piercing and/or she-devil tattoo, but I'm not looking to be friends and neither are you.  If you feel the need to speak, ask something like "Have you been here before/do you know what you want/how the menu works/etc."  Or, even though it might not make any difference, ask how long they want their tortilla steamed.  Nobody is going to know, so you just tell them that 10 seconds is the norm and by the time that little exchange is over you are ready to move down the steam table and ask about the rice and beans.

Jesus, I should have opened Wrapido.

But then, THEN, I go into Freebirds today for the first time in a while.  Months, actually.  Like always, I ask for a Half Bird on cayenne.  Sure as shit, the guy has to ask me twice about the rice and beans.  As we're going down the line, I notice this sign that says to exchange your Freebirds card for some new plastic card.  Like a lot of places, they have this promotion where you get a stamp each time you go there and when you get ten stamps you get a free burrito.  I have a Freebirds card and it had about 6 stamps on it.  I planned on exchanging my card at the register.  I make all my veggie selections and the guy wraps it up and hands me the bag with the letters "RC" written in black marker.  RC stands for Regular Chicken, as in NOT a Half Bird.  Unfuckingbelievable.  This time though, I decided I was just going to let it go.  I was worn out today and I just didn't have the strength to be "that guy."  Then I see a small sign next to the register that says, "Last Day to Redeem Your Paper Freebirds Card is March 31, 2008."  I knew it was going to go one of two ways.  Either 1) I was still going to be able to "Exchange" my paper card for the plastic card, since that's what the sign said and get credit for the stamps I already had, or 2) they were going to fuck me outright.  I get to the register and the girl (with nose piercing and she-devil tattoo) sees me holding my paper Freebirds card and verifies under her breath with another employee standing next to her that the last day to exchange the paper card was March 31.  She then turns to me and asks me what I had.  I roll the bag over to display the "RC" written on the bag.  Then she tells me, "The last day to turn in the paper cards was March 31st, so it's going to be $6.60."  It was option No. 2 - getting fucked outright.

I would have stood paying for a regular size when I ordered a half.  I would have stood for the card exchange deal.  But only one or the other, not both.  I asked her if I would be able to exchange my paper card for the plastic one.  She tells me, no, the last day was March 31st.  I showed her that the sign said the last day to "Redeem" the paper card was March 31st, so I should be able to "Exchange" my paper card for the new plastic one.  I didn't even hear how she responded, but it was basically "No."  Then she says, "We've had signs out about the cards for over a month."  I sort of tossed my paper card onto the counter as I told her, "Well, I ordered a Half Bird and the guy made a Regular, so I guess today I get the double whammy."  The girl takes a sarcastic tone and says, "All you had to do was say they got your order wrong."  And as she's typing in the correction on the register she says, "Wow."  Like, "Wow.  This totally unreasonable asshole is unbelievable."  She tears off the receipt and I sign it.  As I hand it back to her she says, "Sorry about your day" without the slightest bit of legitimate empathy.  The phrases "dirt nap" and "forehead piercing" flickered in the back of my mind, but I just took my food and left. 

I wondered as I walked to my truck whether I should have given that chick the what-for.  Should I have told her about the 100% fuckup rate, the double order question, the difference between "redeem" and "exchange," that just because they publish information about the Freebirds cards on a 5X7 inch card in their restaurant doesn't mean that the information on that card is imputed to me if I haven't seen it, that saying "Wow" like that should give me license to stick my fingers up her nostrils and pull her face into a glass door, or the fact that saying something like "Sorry about your day" is actually worse than saying "Why don't you go stick a red-hot poker up your ass?"

We're so conditioned to avoid confrontation and just "take it" that we forgo opportunities to make things right.  We have automated rationalizations like, "Oh, ordering a burrito is such a small thing it's not worth it to bitch."  Getting angry is natural, but it's being bred out of us.  How would I expect Freebirds to satisfy me as a customer unless I told them what they were doing wrong?  Take this beyond fast food and you can see why revolutions occur.  I get the feeling that the going sentiment is that getting angry, especially over something perceived as small, is not tolerated.  I think that's wrong. 

Get angry people.  Express how you feel.  Make things better.

And don't eat at Freebirds.

Comments

[tom]

This was a great post, by the way.

You're totally right about people not remembering things you're saying under those conditions; hilarious.

[Ojo Rojo]

It's been suggested that getting uptight about something like this is wrong; that you can't change the world starting on such a small scale, nor should you want to. That imperfections in the world are inevitable and should be accepted.

I admit that getting a fast food order wrong is a very small deal. But I would point out that this is a systemic problem with this particular business and not an isolated instance. How would you feel if every time you got your shirts back from the cleaners a button or two was broken? Or if every you get your tires rotated and balanced at NTB the tire pressure is wrong? (Both of these examples happen to me, BTW.) So the answer is to just stop going to that place and patronize their competition, right? That's the shittiest thing of all - there are no better alternatives. They all suck.

One of the hidden suggestions in this post is that the marketplace is constantly degrading when it comes to consumer service-oriented businesses. The reason is simple - providing good quality products and services costs more that providing cheap products and no customer service. We, as consumers, are actually getting less for our money than before. The value is eroding. And it will continue to erode unless consumers act differently. If the market functions properly, any business should seek maximum profitability. That means that a business will provide the least quality products and services they can get away with. It's up to consumers to draw that line. So the issue is larger than some college kid fucking up my Freebirds order.

I'm reminded of a quote that is somewhat applicable that I'm going to paraphrase: "All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."