Photo Credit: Michigan Daily

Most people, when they receive exceptionally terrible service, suck it up and don’t leave a tip. At worst, they dine and dash. Most people, however, don’t operate regional media platforms. My revenge is a little more severe: I write attack articles.

You may remember an event of some magnitude — the “FIFA World Cup.” For the final between the Dutch and the Spanish, I, along with some friends, decided to visit Packard Pub for no reason other than it was close to where we lived. It was one of the worst decisions we ever made.

Our party arrived to Packard Pub at 1:50 — 40 minutes before the game started. At this point, the bar was very sparsely populated, and one member of our party ordered a burger. That burger arrived shortly after halftime, more than an hour and 55 minutes later. Another member of our party, quite independently, ordered potato skins within minutes of kickoff. He received them an hour and 45 minutes later, just after regulation play ended (90 minute game, plus 15 minutes at half time). The absolute lack of service was inexcusable.

Yet excuses they made. When my friends talked to a manager about the nearly 2 hour wait on each of their orders (“Dude, this is ridiculous! Why should I have to pay for this?”), he lectured us about “how this wasn’t his fault” and “how two servers didn’t show up for work today.” Obviously, he was forgetting that it is the role of management to be responsible for their subordinates, and that the inability of their staff to even show up for work reflects on poor hiring practices by the management.

The real kicker of this whole situation was when the manager yelled at us, patrons — over-the-top voice and exaggerated hand motions and all — for complaining. Imagine that, a manager having the gall to yell at patrons for complaining that their food took nearly 2 hours to arrive.

There are a whole host of other ambiance and setup related issues that would make it so I never visit there again, but I think I can pretty safely forgo those for the service issues above. Don’t let the (now) cheap pitchers fool you. You can go there for a $5 microbrew pitcher, but there’s a cost associated with your day being ruined.

It’s only July, but I think I can safely award SHEI’s “Worst Service Ever” award to Packard Pub.

-Sagar Deshpande, SHEI Editor-in-Chief