Not a very kind team. My friend and I came in two and a half hours before closing, yet we were treated as if we had walked in after they closed for the night. No greeting, no acknowledgment, even though three employees watched us walk in and we waved and said hello. The girl at the register didn’t look up, didn’t speak, and didn’t make eye contact the entire time. We just said our order because she wasn’t communicating at all and we didn’t even get to finish our order before she pointed for us to pay. I could tell she did not want to take our order, so I just left it at ice cream instead of the food we had originally planned to get for dinner. It felt unexpectedly rude and tense from the start, and I do not know any of these people personally, so I was a bit shocked to be treated as if I had done something. When our food came out, what seemed like the manager on shift made the comment, “You need to eat and leave quick, we are closing in two hours,” in a tone that made it clear we weren’t welcome. While we were eating, the staff kept looking over at us, loudly cleaning and shutting things down as if we were holding them up, even though the store was supposed to be open for two more hours. At one point, one of the employees loudly said that we were annoying them to another worker, which was shocking because we weren’t talking, messy, or asking for anything. We were literally just sitting and eating. I even asked if they were closing early or if they would have preferred us to go through the drive-thru, but no one said anything and one worker just laughed to themselves. What made it worse was that we had come in because something tragic had happened to my friend earlier that week, and all we wanted was some dinner and ice cream. To be treated like an inconvenience during that was honestly surreal? I worked in the food industry for nine years, all through high school and putting myself through college, so I fully understand how tiring, exhausting, and grueling closing shifts are. I know what it’s like to want to go home, finish homework, or simply relax after a long day, because those shifts are both physically and emotionally draining. I have compassion for that, and I respect the people who work those shifts. But even with that understanding, this experience still felt targeted and unnecessarily unkind. I truly hope I’m the only one they have treated like this, because you never know what a customer is going through or who they might be. I’ve even seen coworkers speak rudely to someone who turned out to be from corporate, and that coworker was let go. Behavior like that can hurt people, and it can hurt the store, even in small, quick interactions. I’ve been coming to this DQ since it opened in 2016, and I just really hope management takes a closer look at what’s going on during these evening shifts. As we were on the way out one of the workers said, “Thank the Lord”, truly one of the most unnecessarily rude and targeted experiences I have had anywhere. If one does not like customers dinning or servicing customers, I think the team is in the wrong service.