The family and I went to Chilis last night for dinner before the Superbowl. We figured most places would be a total shitshow because of the game, but the parking lot didn't look like it had a lot of cars and we didn't see a lot of people eating through the window so we thought maybe it would be okay.
We were wrong. The place was absolutely swamped with take-out orders. The kitchen was backed up. Nobody said so, but I got the distinct impression that the kitchen was under-staffed leading to delays. There was a sizable crowd of people waiting for carry-out. There also looked like a shortage of wait staff, although more of them might have been pulled over to deal with carry-out. Our waitress was running everywhere, and kept apologizing for delays. We kept thanking her and telling her not to apologize. It's not her fault somebody in management didn't hire enough people to meet the demand (or pay enough to keep more people there). She offered to get us a free appetizer because of the long waits, but we declined so we didn't make the situation worse.
We saw grown-ass people yelling and screaming at the young woman at the carry-out desk. She was probably in highschool, maybe early college. She didn't deserve it, it's not the wait staff's fault that the kitchen is backed up because everybody is calling in orders. To her credit and to the credit of the rest of the staff, they all stayed completely professional about it all. One Karen with a spare tire and bad weave loudly demanded “the names, addresses and phone numbers of all the people responsible” and then made loud comments to every new person who got in line about “it's going to be a wait, you know. I've been here for over 30 minutes with no service”.
In the end we dropped an extra-large tip although in hindsight I probably should have left more. Those people deserved it, and the kitchen staff definitely deserved something though I don't know if the tips would have made it back to them or not. I shudder to think about how many people didn't leave a tip at all because of the “bad service”.
If anybody reading this was working a restaurant last night, kudos to you. You deserve more money than you're getting and you don't deserve the way customers treat you.