China Buffet

China Buffet Questionable Customer Service, Lack of Fresh Food Effingham, Illinois

26th of May, 2011 by User394692

I posted this review on .com, and got ripped apart by comments telling me I was being unreasonable. The complaint is below, but before commenting please consider the following before you tell me how unreasonable I am being:
-We had to wait for our children's drinks for 10 minutes. The place was not busy at all.
-Our booth they took us to (many others were open) had food in the seats and on the table, and we had to stand there for a few minutes so it could be cleaned. We asked to go to another booth, but the server didn't respond.
-None of the highchairs had working clips to safely seat our toddler
-A good 1/3 of the buffet's trays were empty, it was dinner, and had not been restocked
- We had already paid via debit
-The staff didn't seem to completely understand English It is a pay-at the-door before you eat place, the food is decent (not
spectacular), but fair. VERY small buffet, not much to choose from. The staff was overall friendly, although hard to communicate with. The booth was dirty and needed cleaning. Lacked highchairs, and needed to restock buffet.
I took my family of 4 there on 5/26/2011 for dinner buffet. It was almost $9 per person. We paid for 3 buffets, and our 2 year old's was free. The manager took our payment at the door. It was quiet, not a lot of people eating. We had got our first plates of food (less than 10min since arrival. They forgot our kids' drinks so we waited), when our toddler had a potty accident (these are rare for him) and was soaked in urine. For sanitary reasons and b/c I wouldn't make my son sit in his
own pee, we felt we should leave. We asked the manager if we could put the remains of the 1 and only plate we had taken from the buffet into boxes to take home. She said, "$9.00 PER BOX". She understood our kid had pee all over him, knew we JUST got there, knew we hadn't eaten and just plain didn't care. We had already paid a total of $27 for one plate each (or rather, 2 bites each). I know they don't want people eating from the buffet then taking a box home, but we HADN'T been able to eat what we PAID for! Given the circumstance, who on earth would pay more to take home one box? It would have totaled $63 for a family of 4 to eat one plate each of VERY MEDIOCRE buffet food. Yeah, right! They also refused to refund ANY of our money. That is TERRIBLE treatment of paying customers. We weren't trying to cheat them out of food, and they knew that! We just wanted what we paid for (actually less! Most people eat more than one plate at a buffet). I am AWARE that it's not the restaurant's fault my child had an accident. Perhaps I should have brought a change of clothes, but there hasn't been a need for that so I didn't. I am aware they have a policy where you must pay to get a box from the buffet for takeout. I just feel that we already paid $9 for our food, we had only one plate, hadn't been able to eat that food, and should be allowed to take it. That's all. The dining experience was not a great one....with that factored in I am upset. Please don't rip me apart here. If you don't agree, just tell me why nicely. Furthermore, expecting the staff at a restaurant (where customer service it critical) to speak English is not making a negative racial remark. Don't go there!

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