Tennessee woman opened her Popeyes box and found a problem. Then the manager’s response made it worse: ‘If you got an air fryer’
Warm meals, cold endings
Getting home with takeout only to find the main part of the meal inedible is frustrating. Driving all the way back just to sort it out makes things worse.
One Tennessee woman expected Popeyes to make things right. However, getting a problem with a Popeyes order fixed wasn’t as simple as bringing the food back. The manager’s response only added to her frustration.
According to TikTok creator Shelby Desha (@shellzmacncheezy), her chicken tenders were so hard she could barely pull them apart. She returned to the Clarksville restaurant hoping for a fresh meal. Instead, the manager offered a solution she clearly wasn’t expecting.
This was getting more frustrating by the minute
Desha told the manager she was willing to return the entire order. Dealing with the chicken and driving back to the restaurant meant the rest of her food was no longer warm. The manager maintained that he would replace only the tenders. “The only thing I can replace is just your tenders,” he told her.
Desha then asked whether she was supposed to eat cold sides with freshly made chicken. His response caught her off guard. “I mean, if you got an air fryer in it, a microwave, that does trick,” the manager responded. Desha pushed back. “I paid for it to be warm, though, when I ate it,” she replied.
The disagreement is especially familiar in fast-food complaints where customers want an order remade rather than a single item replaced. For Desha, replacing only the chicken did not solve the problem because she had ordered the items as one meal.
She also insisted the tenders had not simply become hard while sitting around. She believed something had gone wrong while they were being cooked, telling the employee they could be undercooked or overcooked.
After leaving, Desha showed the chicken on camera and struggled to pull a tender apart. She described it as “damn near barely cooked” and “almost raw.” When the two couldn’t agree, Desha asked to speak with a manager. The employee informed her that she was already speaking to one.
She then requested someone above him and asked for a corporate phone number, but he told her he didn’t have it. When Desha asked for his name, he declined to provide that as well.
“You know that’s wrong, man,” she told him. Desha explained that she had spent gas returning to the restaurant because of the order and simply wanted warm food.
Eventually, she gave up on getting it replaced and revealed that she had recorded the exchange. She told the manager she would contact corporate herself. “You ain’t got to replace none of it,” she said. “Thank you.”
After leaving, Desha questioned how the situation had been handled. “Is this how corporate owned locations treat their customers?” she wrote. “For the record I don’t have a microwave or air fryer, some people are more fortunate than others. I went to bed hungry this night.”
Her video has received 33.8K views. Several commenters familiar with the area recommended a different Popeyes location. “Never ever go to that popeyes. the exit 8 one is supreme,” one viewer wrote.
Another commenter claimed to have experienced trouble with the same manager. “I have a video of him doing the same thing!!!!” they wrote. “Online order too!!! Same manager I was going to send it to cooperate too.”
Desha later shared an update in the comments. Her attempt to resolve the issue with corporate apparently hadn’t gotten her very far. “Apparently corporate says they have addressed my issue but I have heard from NO ONE and still have no meal or my money back,” she wrote.
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