Not so quick serve, holiday time, IA tornado

A friend convinced me to take another go at KFC/A&W. We went a little earlier in the evening than normal, to dine in at the fine establishment. It was again ridiculous. It is so busy, that I think people are assuming it will close down in a week, so they're trying to get as much out of it now as possible. After we ordered, it was about a 25 minute wait in line to get our orders up. It felt like the experience of standing in line for Star Wars opening show tickets, only with the expectation of mediocre food as your reward.
As an aside, I don't understand why there are people that try to cut in front of you after ordering. They take and fill orders in sequential fashion, so it's not like you'll get your food faster if you can make your way to the pick-up counter faster.
The whole time in line, I never saw an employee come out into the "public" area of the store. Tables went uncleaned, the drink station was an absolute disaster area, and best of all: a couple of times people would go up to the pick-up counter to say "you're out of cup lids" or "you're out of napkins out here", and, get this, the employees would hand them a stack of the item and asked the customer to restock them!
As a final insult, we were watching TV later that night and a KFC commercial showed their chicken combos for a remarkable $4 ("why, that's half the price I'd pay at a 'sit-down' restaurant!"). My friend had one of those same combos and his ticket came to more than 6 bucks.
To sum-up:

• It is bad when I could have gotten my food faster at an Applebee's or Friday's or whatever than at a "fast" food restaurant.
• KFC/A&W brings you a unique experience by making you the customer work the restocking of supplies.
• KFC lies about their prices (or at least the franchisee in our area doesn't follow the commercials).
• Didn't mention it before, but this KFC doesn't even have a buffet. Most of the others I've been to around here
  

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This weekend, I put up my outdoor Christmas lights. I want to stress that I will not turn them on for many weeks, because I don't want to condone early holiday decoration. (I put them up because it is supposed to get really cold this week, and I wanted to get the rope light stakes in the ground before it freezes.) It's bad enough that most of our downtown stores are already decked out for Christmas (same day they took down their Halloween decor), and the discount stores have had holiday stock out for a month or more.
Pretty soon, holidays will just flow from one right into the other. It happens earlier every year and is so hard to keep up that I think I'm going to jump right to the Valentine's Day decorations next week. Thanksgiving gets kind of lost in the shuffle, but thankfully one person on main street has a huge, ugly, inflatable, lighted turkey on their lawn. Thank you, sir or madam! Thank you for not succumbing to the accelerated pace of Christmas cheer!
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Video footage of the Stratford, IA tornado (see links by article). Scary footage, and those videographers should consider themselves lucky. That tornado cut a path of destruction in a blink of an eye (or, not as fast as people put up Christmas decorations, but infinitely faster than our KFC/A&W service).