Yumm Mochi — Restaurant in Seattle

It is actually my first time leaving a bad review for a shop, but what happened tonight was a bit extreme... My friends and I used to have a wonderful experience here and had come back for donuts and bubble tea from time to time.

Tonight, a friend of mine and I saw that Bober Tea had Too Good to Go surprise bags, so we decided to do it given our past good experience with the donuts here. When we arrived at the place in time for the pickup, there was a large group of people hanging out inside. We saw that the only staff member there was busy with orders, so we decided that we could wait for a while. However, we ended up waiting for twenty minutes. Then the staff had to call the manager about the size of a surprise bag. After checking with their manager, he told us that they had already run out of donuts for Too Good To Go and asked us to come back tomorrow night.

I don't want to be harsh on the staff, coz he seems to be just a part-time (potentially new) worker having a very busy time. Yet there are definitely major issues with the manager or whoever is in charge of this shop right now. It is fine that there were no surprise bags left, yet they should have cancelled and notified the customers beforehand rather than having people come and waste at least 20 minutes waiting for nothing. In fact, Too Good To Go has a feature for restaurants and shops to allow them to cancel surprise bags early to avoid issues like this.

I also want to quickly note that my friend and I were not the only group who wasted at least 20 minutes waiting there. By the time we left, there were still two or three people waiting for their orders for more than 20 minutes. Reply to the owner's recent comment:

Why don't you just pause Too Good To Go bag for the time being, if you couldn't set it straight? Is that because Too Good To Go is an economic and convenient way for you to cut down marginal loss by giving out stale donuts at a discounted price, where customers pay to be there to take care of your trash and are sent back whenever you don't need them? Based on your past Yelp reviews, the same situation actually just happened a few months ago: you ran out of Too Good To Go bags but still had the customer come and wait 20 minutes for nothing. It seems to be a repeated issue, yet you are still blaming it on the app rather than solving the problem.

You don't have employees for the peak hours, but just one single person handling twenty orders at once. It is a managerial problem for you to be this understaffed. Besides, I heard the staff calling you or the manager and was instructed to ask us come back without any consideration for our time spent on getting there and waiting. How can you excuse that by "it can be especially hard for our new employees to handle unexpected issues"? This is avoidance of your managerial responsibility, rather than...

I'm giving 2-star because I've come previously as a customer, and the owners were super nice (even if the drinks were too sweet for our taste, and mostly ice). I also empathize with the clearly overworked store worker.

This review is for the horrible experience they provided as Too Good to Go customers [an app where you can pick up leftover food at discounted pricing.]

We show up at 9:30 PM -- the start of the 30 minute pickup window. The only store employee is clearly overworked preparing drinks. He completely ignores us for at least 20 minutes while we stand there waiting for him. After two attempts at getting his attention, he says he'll follow up with us. When we show him the app, he says the Surprise Bag is only good for 3 donuts, rather than the usual 6. (Side-note: this wouldn't meet the value requirement for a Too Good to Go bag.) He calls the management to ask for clarification. After a lengthy conversation with them (putting us at about 25 minutes since arrival), he comes back and explains to us that the copious donuts available in their donut rack are only for normal retail customers, and none are available for Too Good to Go users. He recommends that we come back the next day, at which point they would actually would give us the promised Too Good to Go donuts we paid for. (That's not how Too Good to Go works -- you can only pick up during the designated pickup window.) He has no idea how to cancel the order for us -- even though only the business can do that.

In the end, we (and the other TGTG customer) walk out without anything. We wasted 30 minutes per person for nothing.

As someone who does customer service professionally, this is just abysmal. The store had lots of options for us to leave satisfied: They could have cancelled the orders upfront in the app, to avoid wasting our time coming. They could have told us when we arrived that they had no product for Too Good to Go customers -- instead of leaving us wasting 25 minutes to find out. They could have recognized that after leaving us standing around for 30 minutes, it would have been a polite gesture to leave us coming away with something that we paid for.

But to leave us standing there for a half hour doing nothing waiting for them to realize it -- and to make no attempt to make it right beyond asking us to return a second time on faith -- is pretty bonkers.

We won't be back -- as regular customers, or Too Good...

Echoing the previous reviews about Too Good to Go because it felt like this place is using it to scam people. I showed up soon after the pickup window started and was denied a bag. There were 30-40 donuts left and no one in the store with 45 minutes until close so I asked why those couldn't be used to make up a bag. The employee said that TGTG was crazy because it is a loss for the business to give away food at its "raw material price". The employee suggested instead that I buy a dozen and get 2 free (for nearly $40 a dozen instead of the $7.99 I paid for a bag on TGTG). The point of this service it to limit food waste with a small kickback to the company for a sustainable practice, not to draw people in and corner them into paying for donuts that will be thrown out in less than an hour. Then again, it seems like the main complaint in these reviews is that the donuts are stale, so the store may be keeping the leftovers and selling them the next day. At least have the decency to close your TGTG account so people aren't going out late for a pickup that you won't honor. Very dishonest practice, avoid this place unless you want day-old donuts that the store refused to someone the...