This woman remained unbothered after Olive Garden tried to get her and her family arrested for paying with a gift card.
Olive Garden is a popular, family-friendly restaurant known for its Italian-American (because we surely can’t call it authentic Italian) cuisine. They offer a variety of pasta, soups, salads, and breadsticks and are known to do “all-you-can-eat” deals. It’s known for being a moderately priced place to take the family out to eat.
Bad vibes from the start
In a viral video with more than 810,000 views, Aundrèa (@inkeduptee) decided to treat her family to lunch at Olive Garden since she had a $175 gift card to spend.
The vibes are off at the location from jump, Aundrèa says.
First, the server refused to serve two of the adults’ liquor because they only had their IDs in virtual form. You generally need your original form of ID to be served alcohol, and Olive Garden might have a policy requiring servers to ID everyone.
But then Aundrèa started to feel singled out when the server gave everyone but her a glass of water and again skipped over her when it came to grating fresh cheese on her pasta.
Things take a turn
The situation didn’t bubble over until it came time to pay.
Aundrèa had a $175 Olive Garden gift card that she put down for payment, but the restaurant refused to use it since “corporate got a lot of scams going on.”
All the manager had to do was swipe her badge to allow the use of the gift card. Instead, she told Aundrèa that they needed to pay with cash or card.
Aundrèa pulled out a stack of bills to show that the issue wasn’t that she didn’t have the money for the meal, but that she was being unfairly treated.
“I’m gonna call the cops and give you a trespassing ticket if you refuse to pay or you can place the order online with the gift card,” the manager allegedly told them.
“So you let her call the police,” Aundrèa says in the video, laughing.
From what we can piece together from the follow-up videos, the police did come and the location pressed charges, but Aundrèa ended up not having to pay.
In a text message screenshot, Aundrèa said that she reached out to Olive Garden corporate, who not only dropped the trespassing charges, but doubled the gift card amount to $400 to make up for the bad experience.
@inkeduptee Bro this is literally the funniest thing , I recorded even after the cops got there 🤣 Pt.1
♬ original sound – AUNDRÈA
Olive Garden scam
There has been an Olive Garden scam going around for the last few years, but it isn’t diners doing the scamming, fact-checker Snopes reported.
Instead, scammers set up fake Facebook profiles that look like Olive Garden affiliate pages or the CEO’s page and offer a meal and drink voucher for two if you like, share and comment on the post and then register your information at a specific link.
The link is where the scam comes in, with it leading promotional sites that leave people vulnerable for phishing and identity theft.
This has also happened with other fast food restaurants and retailers including Chick-fil-A, Texas Roadhouse, KFC, and Costco.
Commenters react
“I hate when people get jobs that they really don’t wanna work and that they really be mad that they gotta come to work and I want to do their job,” the top comment read.
“Im still stuck on $180 at Olive Garden that’s wild,” a person said.
“This always my fear. I show the gift card etc before I order. DO YALL ACCEPT THIS!? Cuz if the answer is no, I’m out,” another wrote.
“I work at OG. Two weeks ago our location started taking ONLY physical gift cards bc people were coming in with gift card numbers that were fraudulent and servers were getting in trouble for accepting them,” a worker explained.
The Daily Dot reached out to Aundrèa for comment via email and Instagram direct message and to Olive Garden via email.
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