Olive Garden: American flag display would disrupt dining experience

This story is from October, but an Anon commenter reminded me that I never shared it with you guys.

Summary: "The comments come after 80-year-old Marti Warren of Anniston said she wasn't allowed to bring an American flag into an Olive Garden for a planned Kiwanis Club banquet in the east Alabama town of Oxford."

There's even a snopes article about the event, indicating that several Freepers sent outraged emails about this to their friends and family.

A communist restaurant... they cannot ever get me to eat in their place... ever again.

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I am so unsettled. What is it with all this strange behavior from so many people coming to light in these recent years. What kind of person would object to an American flag?

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Wonder how disruptive it would be just to take a crap in their big salad bowl? Screw Commie Garden!

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Good thing I never had dinner there. Who wants to eat at an un-American restaurant that serves fake Italian food.

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I’ve decided before to boycott all Darden restaurants because they were in bed with The First Wookie on her ‘Let’s Move’ crap and making their french fries ‘PG’. This REALLY clinches it for me.

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You will understand if I and my family leave your brand to pursue your offensive disdain for this nation’s flag without us. We have had our last meal at the Olive Garden chain. I imagine you can save on overhead by discontinuing menus in English. I doubt you’ll have much call for them.

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Who the hell are they pandering to? Only black and white Americans eat there! Who the hell are they pandering to?

I hate it. Another damned good restaurant needlessly headed for the crapper in a bad economy due solely to PC. S**t!

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Betcha they'd book a luncheon for a local union in a heartbeat, AFL-CIO banner and all.

Olive Garden then issued an apology:

"Dear Guest:

We are very sorry for any misunderstanding about this issue. We do not have a policy at Olive Garden concerning bringing the American flag into our restaurants. Some members of our team were misinformed about company policy by our corporate office. As a company we take responsibility for that and we regret it. We take pride in how we communicate to our restaurants and we are correcting this so it doesn’t happen again. Like all Americans we have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for the American flag and everything it symbolizes. In fact, we periodically provide American flag collar pins to our employees to wear while serving guests. We welcome anyone who wishes to bring the flag into our restaurants.

Sincerely,

John Caron President, Olive Garden"

*By the way, I'm excluding a fun exchange with the OP, "satan69", where several other Freepers call her out on her user name, accuse her of trolling, and call her a 'freak', until she explains that it's because some liberals called her 'Satan' once, and then everything's resolved.

I was going to boycott them for their responce to the flag... I happen to like their salad and bread sticks.. Not to mention the beer is cold. My son likes to go there for the all you can eat so I mumch on the salad...

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they also received a waiver for obozocare...

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Which begs several questions.

1) Why was anyone at the restaurant even calling corporate to ask in the first place? It should be a no brainer.
Answer: because the management of that particular restaurant is leftest pond scum who didn't want the flag shown.

2) What person/persons in corporate gave this "erroneous" policy information to them? The receptionist? Hardly. Had to be someone reasonably well up the ladder.

3) If it was NOT corporate policy then the logical assumption is that there is a rogue executive that should be getting a DRE with a 4 D cell mag light.

4) Or, it was indeed corporate policy and this is simply CYA because they didn't expect to get called on it (which is pretty stupid, except we know libs are stupid)

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The Darden restaraunt chain seems to be big leftist supporters from what I can tell. They just sent out this statement so working Americans will still go there and employ them and give funding for communists, instead of going broke by feeding homeless substance abusers for free if they walked their talk IMHO. They lost my business.

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"Do you know if Olive Garden gives to any PC politicians or organizations? "

No idea. But (without facts to back this up) I make the assumption that most of the national corporations in the US are paying tribute of some kind to the left, be it campaign contributions to Dem pols, or protection/extortion money to a leftist/PC organization.