The public puts a lot of trust in restaurants, but what happens when restaurants make mistakes?
Two large family restaurant chains have made mistakes recently that did not involve food. These mistakes involved serving alcohol to children. This is the type of mistake that can kill a small child and it should never happen in the first place.
Applebee’s has found itself in a PR nightmare after claims surfaced that a 15-month old baby in Michigan was accidentally served a margarita instead of a healthy cup of apple juice. It seems they’ve made this same mistake before in New York, California and Colorado.
Applebee’s says this mistake will never happen again and has started a nationwide “retraining” program that will teach all their servers the right way to mix drinks. They will go one step further and store non-alcoholic beverages in a separate location.
But Applebee’s isn’t alone in this mixed up drink fiasco.
Olive Garden made a similar mistake recently, by giving a two year old a serving of sangria instead of OJ. In a released statement, Olive Garden said the mistake was “unacceptable” and that they have also made changes to prevent such incidents from happening again.
A thousand things can go wrong during any restaurant shift, and incidents such as these are rare, but they do serve as a wake-up call to the restaurant industry to re-evaluate their systems and procedures in order to help prevent these kinds of mistakes from ever happening again.