My wife and I had the strangest experience at our local BK a while back. We had a mobile coupon for a BOGO free Whopper. We don't normally go to BK but hey, free food. We put in our order (two Whoppers) at the drive thru and before they gave me the total I mentioned I had the coupon. The cashier tells me that they don't accept coupons. So we go up to the window so I can show her that it is in fact a BK coupon on their app. She says she still can't take it and gets her manager. He says that they're a franchise and “not really Burger King” despite the fact that their signage and menu all say they are and that not all locations accept the mobile app coupons. We thought that was weird, but accepted his explanation…but since we didn't want to pay full price (we literally only came there because of the coupon) we politely asked to cancel the order.
That's when the manager lost. his. shit. He started ranting to the employee, as if we weren't there, about how he can't just cancel the order and that it has to be completed. He continued to say that he's losing money because he has to personally pay for “all of these transactions with coupons.” So if I understood him correctly, any time someone tries and fails to use a coupon and decides not to complete their order, there's no “cancel” button and he has to, out of his pocket, pay for the meal? I don't understand why BK would have a system that doesn't allow cancelation of an order and why an employee or even a franchise owner would have to eat the cost of said cancelled order. What if I placed my order but realized I forgot my wallet, or got an emergency phone call and had to leave right away? I felt bad (for the cashier, especially) but we started to roll away right as he was starting to sound really angry, and just wanted to GTFO of there. Especially when we heard him slam the cash register shut behind us and kept ranting. The whole thing just boggled our minds.
Maybe they've changed their systems since then (I think this was 2013 or 14?) but wow…why would anybody want to work for them if that is their policy? It just seemed like an awful place to work. How hard is it to program a register to have a “cancel” button?!