My idiotic corporate managers make the dumbest policy change on planet earth by allowing children to eat for free at our restaurant every single Sunday,

resulting in some of the most chaotic nights of service I've ever experienced in my life, with this restaurant eventually having to shut down.

Here's what happened.

Okay, to start things out, I'm pretty happy overall with where I work now, but this is a tale from years ago

at my first serving job. Two things stand out about the following issue. One, I am surprised how

normal we can find stuff at our first jobs. Then, later, when we get experienced, we can see how

actually insane they were. And two, we can see how utterly clueless corporate can be. I will add this

place I'm talking about did eventually

go out of business, so I'm honestly not really surprised. So, during college, I worked at a family-oriented

Italian place. They tried to appeal to the higher end of casual dining, pretty decent food, but

nothing super special. But we were oh so family-friendly. So corporate decided they wanted us to be

the place everyone in the

area thought of when taking their family out to eat. So they implemented the dreaded three-word

policy. They said that kids eat free. Now this is not an unheard of policy, but most places I've

heard of that do this, do it on a slower day like Tuesday just to get a little extra pop. But no, our higher-ups decided to make this all day Sunday. But wait, you might be saying, don't most places that do that have it with minimum purchase? Places I've been to have a policy like, oh, one kid's meal per adult meal. And true, we did have a minimum. But for every adult entree purchased, you would then get four free kids meals. So guess what

ended up happening? And you probably know, but I'm just going to spell it out. Our kids' meals

came with bread, super salad, and entree and dessert. And our cheapest adult entrees were $7. So we did

become the place that people took their families out to eat. And this was their whole families.

And this was every

single Sunday. It was completely common, if not normal, for nearly 20 people to come in that were

essentially what you would expect to see on a weekday field trip to a Chuckie cheese. I mean,

we were by far the cheapest place in town. You would have a tent top where two parents had eight

...