If you were to ask me how often I eat at places like Chili's or Applebee's I'd answer by saying almost never. There are far too many restaurants with better food and better value that are locally owned to waste time eating at places like this. The only time I will ever order anything from there is if I'm part of a larger party that decides that's where they want to go or if I have in some way acquired a giftcard for one of those places. The latter was the case today when I tried to get some chicken tenders to avoid the bane of my existence, the grocery store, for one more day. Unfortunately when I presented my giftcard to pay for my meal it was rejected due to not being properly loaded when it was purchased from a 3rd party retailer. I was upset because I'd have to pay out of pocket, and The Girlfriend's grandparents who gave me the card for my birthday wasted their money. Surprisingly, the manager offered to give me the food for half price despite the fact that she was under no obligation to do so. If she hadn't done this I wouldn't have been upset. After all the issue was not their fault, and they had prepared my food in good faith. I thought it was very nice of the manager to do this for me without any needed complaining on my part, and I thought it was worthy of a little shoutout here at RDERF. Moral of the story here if you are purchasing giftcards of any type from a 3rd party retailer for Christmas gifts beware that they might screw it up. When you're buying Christmas gifts in a tough economy like this every dollar should count.P.S. The food isn't really worthy of comment, but if you're curious the tenders in the honey chipotle sauce weren't bad. The chicken was juicy. The coleslaw wasn't bad, but definitely nothing special. The fries were borderline awful as they usually are at Chili's. No excuses for that.
