Aditi A.
Yelp
Just had a very confusing and frustrating experience at icicles. My cousins and I went in a group of 7 to get icIcles. We arrive at the store at about 10:40pm. The store closes at 11 and there's a bit of a line, but we figure we should be able to order before it closes. However, one of the icicles employees comes up to us and says "hey, if you make sure that no one else comes after you, we will comp your order". The younger kids get excited about this, but the rest of us figure it's too good to be true since there's so many of us. I'm still not sure why this was something that was offered to us in the first place; regardless, we told anyone who joined the line after us that they were no longer accepting customers.
We reach the kiosk about 5 minutes before the store closes and start ordering on the computer. However, we are stopped by the same employee as before, who instead manually writes down each of our orders on ice cream cups. Then, after conferring with the manager, he informs us that they can only comp one of our ice creams. We will have to pay for the other 6 after we get the food, since the employee had already manually taken our order. While this was slightly disappointing, we didn't mind because we were originally planning to buy our own ice cream anyway. However, it's important to note that because of this mix up, our orders were never inputted into the kiosk.
We were then told to wait for our orders to come through. Around 11:35, we receive the one free order that we were promised. A different employee then asks us if we were waiting on anything else. I tell him that we still have 6 orders that haven't come through yet. I explained the situation; we have 6 ice cream orders that were manually entered that we hadn't yet paid for. However, the employee we spoke to earlier was nowhere to be found and could not corroborate our story.
The second employee said that we did not have an order entered through a kiosk, and when we asked if we could re-enter our order because of the mix-up, he refused, saying their store was now closed. When we argued about having originally made our order when the store was open, he said that we were lying, and that based on the time stamps of the previous orders that did go through on the kiosk (the latest of which was 10:55pm), there was no way we actually ordered on time. Here's where I started to get frustrated. Not only did we arrive at the kiosk with a good FIVE MINUTES to place our order, we also were told MULTIPLE TIMES that we would be the last order of the night. The only reason our order was not on the kiosk was because we were SPECIFICALLY TOLD not to enter it. None of us ASKED for free ice cream; we were perfectly willing to buy 7 ice creams before this whole situation happened. My eight year old cousins were incredibly disappointed as well; this was their first time ever trying rolled up ice cream, and in the end neither of them got their order.
I'm not sure what went wrong here: whether it was the store's confusing policy of giving away free ice cream, the kiosk system, miscommunication between employees, not cutting people off soon enough before closing time, or maybe just misinformation from the original employee we spoke to. I do, however, hope that this gets resolved soon, as I am someone who frequents this specific icicles location, and I would like to continue doing so.
