Idiocracy at Dairy Queen

If you haven’t seen the movie Idiocracy, you should. It really should be required viewing for everyone on what this world may turn out to be if we’re not careful. Yesterday, I came face-to-face with my own scene from this movie at Dairy Queen. Now I’m not going to say anything about Dairy Queen and its workers because I’m sure many people out there have held high school summer jobs at places like this, but this was pretty bad so I thought it needed telling.

After our shopping trip to Safeway, we stopped off at the nearby Dairy Queen. It was hot. The kids had been good so I thought a cold treat might help with the walk home. We walk in and I ask if they have kid size cones and/or cups. My kids don’t need a full serving of ice cream and most of it ends up on them anyway so it seems silly to pay a bunch of money ice cream on their pants. The 16-year old worker looks at me dumbfounded by my request. I explain that they will lose ½ the ice cream and could he somehow give me a smaller version of their “small.” Again, he just stares at me. He shows me the small cone. I say, fine, but can you fill it just a bit and charge me a little less than $2 for the cone for only a droplet of ice cream. Apparently this cannot be done. (You’ll understand why in a minute.) Alex is insisting that he can eat the whole thing and that he’ll be fine. So I order a small cup for Anna and a small regular cone for Alex. The total comes to $4.18 which I believe is highway robbery for ice cream for kids, but by this point I was tired of Dairy Queen. I give the man $5.18. He looks stunned. Asks me if the change I gave him was 18 cents. I said, yes. He then turned to his friggin’ calculator and proceeded to subtract!!! I started laughing. (I know, bad mommy manners.) So I tell him, “My change is a dollar. I get a dollar back.” He does the calculation and says, “Your change is a dollar, you’re right.” Oh….my….God! Is this guy for real?

This supposed high school kid (same one who couldn’t do the change) puts the ice cream in the cone. Alex’s eyes pop out of his head, as do mine. The soft serve ice cream is piled so high that it’s actually bigger than the cone itself AND tilted to one side. I guess after the whole money thing clogged his brain he didn’t remember that the discussion was about my kids not needing tons of ice cream. I rolled my eyes, stared at him in disbelief then asked for a spoon and a cup and did what I should have done from the beginning: put half of the ice cream in the cup and gave it to Anna. The guy looked shocked that I had come up with this solution.

The funny thing is, this isn’t the first time this has happen. The other dialogues haven’t been quite as ridiculous as this. But I will say that most of the ice cream places have a hard time negotiating around the concept of “kid sized” for our wee ones. Ben and Jerry’s did agree to split the one scoop into two cups, but that will put you back about $3-4. Whoa! Baskin Robbins does do a mini kid cup. For future trips, I would recommend to anyone else that encounters scenes from Idiocracy at the ice cream shop to get the smallest size and just splitting it into two cups for the kids. Live and learn.