Man Allegedly Threatened Restaurant Staff Because They Were Out of Ranch Dressing

If you place your order at a restaurant, and the staff tells you that they’re out of ranch dressing, there are a lot of ways you could handle it. You could nod and say, “That’s alright”; you could ask for a substitute sauce; or you could just order a different entree that wasn’t completely ranch-dependent. What you shouldn’t do is threaten whichever worker had to look you in the eye and tell you that they didn’t have any ranch dressing at the moment.

ClickOnDetroit reports that police were called to an as-yet-unidentified restaurant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, after an unnamed male customer did, in fact, make threats because the joint was out of ranch. The situation didn’t escalate to a full-fledged assault, but the man was asked to leave the property, which he did.

Look, sometimes restaurants don’t have what you want when you want it—but can we just calm the fuck down about it? This ranch-related freakout happened just a couple of weeks after a woman reportedly trashed a Rally’s in St. Louis after she discovered that it was out of chocolate ice cream. According to a police report obtained by The Smoking Gun, she allegedly “became enraged after ordering her food,” spat at employees, and then broke the restaurant’s windows with a baseball bat. She left the property in a gray SUV and, as of this writing, has neither been identified nor apprehended.

In January, an Oklahoma City man either didn’t get enough hot sauce or didn’t get any hot sauce when he stopped at a Taco Bell drive-thru window, and he responded by pulling a gun and firing more than one shot into the restaurant. "Any time you've got people inside of a business and some person decides, for whatever reason, to fire bullets into that business, makes for a very dangerous situation and we're extremely fortunate that nobody was hurt,” Oklahoma City Police Department Master Sergeant Gary Knight said at the time.

The workers were able to lock themselves in the bathroom, and after shooting the drive-thru window out, the man drove off.

Maybe we should all start carrying packets of hot sauce or ketchup or whatever our condiment of choice is. Or maybe—and we’re just spitballing here—maybe we could just calm the fuck down and accept that sometimes restaurants run out of supplies. Ranch dressing is overrated, anyway.