Parent Thread

Alright, so I have a situation here and I am not exactly sure what I should do next. Let me explain.

We went out to dinner tonight to a place called Pieology. The decor is mostly metal and wood, very similar to Chipotle. As we are in line ordering our pizza's, one of my 3 year old twins starts screaming. My wife picks her up to try and figure out what is going on, and she has a pretty sizable gash on her ankle. Here is what it looked like at the ER after they cleaned it up. Spoilered for anyone who may not want to look.


She ended up having to get 3 stitches to close it up. Made for a pretty unpleasant night overall.


So, how exactly did she cut it? At the base of the counter it is all metal, and where two of the pieces come together it essentially wasn't flush and was sharp as fuck. (apologies if I am not explaining this well enough, but basically picture baseboard but it is metal) She somehow managed to snag her ankle on it, we aren't entirely sure how. But this is where I get pretty pissed off with this place. We immediately let them know my daughter is cut, and the people putting our pizzas together just sorta look at us dumbfounded and keep asking what we want on our pizza. So I ask to speak to the manager just to let them know there is a serious issue with their counter. When I tell her what happened, she seems totally baffled and not at all sure how to handle it or what to do. She basically said "oh, I am sorry" and went back behind the counter. My mother in law was actually with us at the time, and while I was trying to get the pizza's finished up and manage the other 2 little ones, she asked the lady in charge if she wanted to go look at the cut. (my wife had taken her to the bathroom at this time to try and stop the bleeding).

The manager goes back to the bathroom and apologizes to my wife and asks if she needs anything. My wife managed to get the bleeding to stop (sort of) and put a big bandage on it. She comes out of the bathroom about 10 minutes later and my daughter is just sitting there crying, and we try to eat real quick and decide what to do next. Up until this point I hadn't actually seen the cut, so I didn't know exactly how bad it was other than it bled a lot. At one point another employee comes out with some ice, and she is super friendly and very apologetic. Up until this point it didn't seem like a single person gave a single fuck about what had happened. But here is where it gets even better. The employee tells us how they know it is really sharp, and they have had employees cut themselves on it before when cleaning. WTF?! She straight up admits to us that they knew it was a problem, and had done jack shit about fixing it. Needless to say, I am quite pissed at this point. However, clearly bitching at the manager in charge will do nothing because she is just a shift supervisor and is in over her head in this particular situation. So I figured I would call in and talk to the General manager later. When we went outside I pulled back the bandage to take a look, and knew we had to take her to the ER. So off we went.

I am just so baffled by their handling of the situation that I don't even know what to say. They clearly had no process in place for incident management, and if they did this manager had some seriously poor training. She didn't take down any of our info, didn't sit and ask questions about what happened or note down the extent of my daughters injury. I had to actually go and give her my contact information before I left, and told her I would be following up after we find out how bad the cut really is.

So I called them back tonight after we got home from the hospital, and it never answered so I left a relatively detailed message. Then I took another step and went to their corporate site and emailed them a detailed account of what happened. So we will see what happens next. Oh, and we did receive a call from the store tonight and the manager asked how my daughter was. We let her know that she needed 3 stitches and they should really get that taken care of. She said the GM came out and took pictures and sent it over to the owner. She apologized again and asked if there was anything they could do for us. I simply told her that I was pretty annoyed with how everything went down, that I had emailed corporate and I would wait to hear back from the owner and the Corp office.

On to my question. What do I do next? I really am not the type to sue, and I am not even sure we could here. But when I found out they knew about the problem, and even had their own employees cut by it before, I got pretty pissed off. My kid is only 3 years old, and hearing her scream as they gave her the shot to numb it (which didn't even work. she screamed each time he put the needle in to put in another stitch) and stitched her up was pretty damn upsetting. Do I just wait to hear what they have to say, and at least insist they reimburse our co-pay for the ER visit? I am just not sure what I should do next.

Sorry for the long wall of text. I wanted to try and give as much detail as possible.

Thanks for the feedback guys, I appreciate it. Going to sit down with the wife and take the next steps.

To be honest I wasn't all that shocked that the employees were baffled at what to do. I was mostly disappointed in the manager being completely lost though. That and the fact that they had an issue that they knew existed. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed with it all. I mean shit happens, kids get hurt. But that is just negligent on their part for ignoring the problem.