Tarkblog

In light of recent comments pertaining to the YUM owned establishments, I thought I would share some recent history I had with the aforementioned company as well.

I’m not a big fan of KFC. Don’t get me wrong - I like fried chicken, but I can buy it at the walmart a whole lot cheaper. Or, I can just fry it myself. Yeah, I don’t get the Colonel’s blend of spices out of the deal, but I’m willing to sacrifice that. Or I could just buy the KFC batter at the store.

Every now and then, though, it seems like I end up at a KFC. There’s one near my house - in fact, it’s a KFC/Pizza Hut Express. This place was special because they have an all you can eat buffet. For 5.99 you can have all of the chicken and other goodies you want, which is a bargain considering a bucket of 10 pieces is like 8.99.

My distaste for the whole thing started in Castleton, when Annie and I went to a KFC/A&W place for lunch one day. We went for one very important reason : we had coupons. My memory is a little fuzzy of the experience, and perhaps she can fill in the details, but I do recall attempting to order some kind of thing that the coupon was good for and the lady just looked at me like I was nuts. The main reason she did so is because she didn’t speak a lick of English. And she had no idea what I was asking for or how to read the coupon to interpret what I wanted to save. After some confusion, we ended up getting some food (because we were hungry) that may or may not have been at all what we ordered. I believe she also called the “manager” out to help with the situation - this guy did speak English, but with all of the aptitude of what you would expect from a man named Jorge Rodriguez - in other words, I couldn’t understand him.

So we ate our full priced food and I contemplated how I was going to handle the situation. I decided to file a complaint at the KFC website. I went through the procedure, found a place to file the complaint, and filled out the online form. When I clicked submit, a javascript popup came up saying something about how I hadn’t filled out one of the lines correctly. I checked it, and I did have it correctly filled in. I submitted agian, again with the same error. I changed the text a bit, and still continued to get the same error. I messed with it a little bit more, and eventually the browser crashed. So I gave up, more pissed off than ever before.

Sometime later Annie and I ventured over the local KFC/Pizza Hut place to use some more coupons we had for a buy one get one free lunch sandwich deal. We get there, and the lady looks at us like we are completely nuts. “We don’t serve those here” she tell us. I’m like “you don’t serve chicken sandwiches here?”. She’s like: “all we serve are pieces of fried chicken, crispy strips, and popcorn chicken”. WTF is that? She hadn’t even seen coupons like that before. I think we left and went somewhere else to eat.

A few weeks ago, at lunch, a coworker and I headed over to the KFC buffet for a nice change of pace. Upon getting there we found a sign on the door: “We are no longer serving a lunch buffet Monday - Thursday”. Great idea - take away your main source of 11AM-2PM revenue.

On the way from Indy < -> Angola, the midpoint is Gas City to which they have a KFC/Taco Bell combination. We’ve stopped in there twice, and after the first time I’m not sure what prompted us to give them a second chance, but after the second time we won’t be going back.

I heart Taco Bell, but if you get it anywhere near a Pizza Hut Express, A&W or a KFC, you’re just asking for trouble.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 9:06 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.