A Rant Against the Restaurants of Dothan

[bends over to look under table]

[pulls out soapbox]

[stands on soapbox and begins to speak]

I have something to say.

The restaurants in Dothan, Alabama are terrible! It is absurd at how miserable a job these places run their "organization" (hard to call it that because I saw little of anything resembling organized). Visiting my father the past two days, who was in the hospital with chest pains--he's ok by the way, no heart problems--I had to eat twice (well sort of 3 times) at food establishments in Dothan. With the exception of McDonald's (which is odd because usually McD's usually has awful service), who did a fantastic job (my food arrived quick and correct) all of the restaurants failed me miserably.

Here's some of my complaints:

1) Make sure you get the order right. If you don't give people what they want, especially when they've invested the time and money to get to your place, you are failing as a business. Of the 5 items (excluding drinks) that we ordered at Taco Bell, 4 of them were wrong. Captain D's did little better, forgetting my extra fries and that I ordered with a coupon. Now, Taco Bell saved a little face be replacing my whole order for free (and much quicker than the first order came up).

2) If you expect large volumes of people, have space for them. I've never been diagnosed as a claustrophobic, and I've never noticed myself having a problem with small spaces--until this weekend. Apparently if I'm in a tight space with a lot of people around me talking loudly and moving back and forth, I get a little frazzled. I would have never known this, however, if only TB and CD offered a little more space to wait on your food.

3) Restaurants are the face of the city they are in. Oftentimes, a restaurant is the first impression a person has of a city. Now, I've been to Dothan a lot in my life, and I would never take a vacation there because of how close I grew up to it, but I thought to myself in those crowded, poor service restaurants how I would never want to visit this city based on the impression I got in the restaurant. It's amazing. It's not like the Visitor's Bureau of Dothan runs the restaurants (maybe they should). But I unfairly (but matter-of-factly) have a negative impression of Dothan because of two restaurants!

4) Customer service is HUGE. If you want people to hang around you, or your business, you need to treat them like royalty. At the new Waffle House in Harpersville, they open the door for you and welcome you to a fully-staffed, fully clean restaurant (granted, it is new, but still). Even though I'd rather have the steak and eggs at Huddle House, the experience at Waffle House is enough to draw me back. Conversely, the experience I had at CD's and TB in Dothan made me never want to go to those two stores ever again.

Now, maybe you've noticed or not, this has a correlation with churches, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what...