Customers Attack an IHOP Manager When They Find Out OJ Refills Aren't Free
Source – IHOP has to recoup their losses from their annual “All You Can Eat Pancake” deal somehow.
A group dining at an IHOP restaurant in North Carolina reportedly became violent after learning that their refills of orange juice weren’t free, according to police.
The incident, which went down at an IHOP location in Asheville, took place just before noon last Thursday, Fox Carolina reported. The group had reportedly damaged restaurant property upon learning of the orange juice charges, and even assaulted an IHOP manager, who sustained non-life-threatening injuries. …
IHOP has since released a statement condemning the guests’ violent actions.
“The type of unprovoked, violent behavior displayed by this guest has no place in any business and goes against our core values as a brand,” a representative for IHOP stated, per WSOC.
Not to engage in victim-shaming, but IHOP is not completely blameless in this terrible incident. And I say that as someone who is a staunch advocate of non-violence at breakfast chains. As one of the world’s most outspoken proponents of “Use your words when complaining to a pancake restaurant manager.” But even I, a true prince of peace when it comes to these matters, has to admit that IHOP is somewhat culpable here.
They offered All You Can Eat Pancakes. Didn’t they have any idea what kind of clientele an offer like that attracts? People who’ll show up to eat unlimited pancakes aren’t normal breakfast customers. They become ravagers. Savage, inhuman, hungry animals, hellbent on quenching their insatiable appetite. Left to their own devices, the All You Can Eat crowd would keep horking down pancakes until their stomachs explode like overfed cattle. When they’re denied anything, it’s like you’ve thrown a bunch of steaks at a pack of wolves but then tried to tell them they can’t touch the pork chop. That manager might as well have jumped into a feeding frenzy of sharks and told them his/her legs were off limits. Good luck with that.
The lesson to be learned here is you can’t offer people all the free pancakes they can force down their extra gluten, high cholesterol, overfed gullets, not to mention free, unlimited refills of coffee, syrup and butter, and expect them to act like rational human beings when you don’t feed them OJ by the gallon. It doesn’t make you wrong to expect them to pay for what they drink. Just naive if you think they won’t go berserk on you. I made a similar reference this week in a totally different context but, when you give a moose a muffin, he’ll ask for jam to go with it. When you give a group of binge eaters unlimited pancakes, they’ll ask for free orange juice. That’s Restaurant 101.