Getting annoyed sometimes is inevitable, but there is no excuse for an adult throwing tantrums like these in public. People share the worst adult tantrums they've ever seen while working in the food industry.
Crying Over Milk
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“I saw a full grown adult pitch a fit about the increased price of milk. They went and grabbed the receipt of their last week groceries. The difference was 3 cents. They proceed to go through every derogatory word to describe the poor hourly worker; literally stomps their feet. After 10 minutes of this, the managers finally arrive to only have it repeated for another 10 minutes. Management caved and awarded the individual the price of milk for a week ago. All of this was over 3 cents.”
Tax?? How Dare They!
“I was working at a small convenience store. I usually work as a cashier and another person works in the back of the store at the deli. Well, this guy comes in and wants a breakfast sandwich from the deli and my co worker tells him it’ll be about 10 minutes because she has to make it. He starts to get really mad that he has to wait. I guess he thought they were pre-made or something. Anyway, he waits while she makes his sandwich and comes up to pay and I ring up his sandwich. The price is $3.99 and it’s written on the sandwich but it has a tax for prepared food so it’s actually a little over $4. He starts yelling at me about how I had the price wrong and he’s in a hurry. When I explain we have tax for sandwiches he gets pissed, grabs the sandwich and flings it right at my head and runs out of the store. So he pretty much wasted 15 minutes and I got a free breakfast sandwich for lunch.”
“He Grabbed The Coffee Beans And…”
“I used to work for a coffee shop that was ALWAYS busy. I mean like there was a constant line out the door. I had a man completely skip the line of about 10-12 people waiting, grab a juice out of our fridge and come up to me single handedly ringing everyone through. He cut off the next person and put the drink down and started pulling money out of his wallet, and I told him I wouldn’t ring him through without standing in line first, there’s a queue. Use it. He went from a general asshole, smug expression to enraged, red faced, screaming at me telling me that he was just buying a juice, not a coffee, to stop being so stupid and just ring him through, berated me for being a barista even though if I wasn’t there he wouldn’t be getting any service, and if I was even remotely smart I wouldn’t be working here, so to just do my job like a good girl and ring him through. And then threw money at me. I didn’t even remotely change my expression the whole time, his bills all fell on the floor in front of him, I pushed his juice aside and then motioned to the next person in line to order. He got so angry that he looked like a dumb ass in front of so many people and didn’t affect me, he grabbed a 1lb bag of coffee beans off of our counter and threw it across the store, grabbed his bills off the floor and walked away, telling me that he would never come back and our business would fail.”
You Can’t Throw A Fit If You’re A Thief
“I was working the graveyard at a gas station and two guys walk in. Well, one decided to try and be slick and grab some snacks and run. Unbeknownst to him, one door was locked and he runs straight into it which obviously alerted me to what was going on. I come out to find him out cold on the floor. His buddy meanwhile decides to berate me for not leaving the other door unlocked. Goes completely insane. Throws ice all over the place, proceeds to throw ICEE cups full of Pepsi Freeze all over the floor, and smashes two of my bottles of Grey Goose. Finally, he pauses and asks, ‘Your not gonna call the cops are you?’ To which I said, ‘Of course not, look outside’ (we were a substation) and his face just drops. Two county cruisers rolled in mid tantrum after I hit the panic button. His tantrum cost us several thousand in property and damaged goods, but seeing him and his buddy get cuffed and the satisfaction I felt that night: Priceless.”
A Miserable Valentine’s Day
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“I was working at a really nice restaurant one Valentine’s Day and this couple came in saying it was their anniversary. The woman was really nice and telling me all about how they had their first date at this restaurant and they come every year on Valentine’s Day and order the exact same thing they had on their first date. They had some wine and cocktails and when they ordered their ‘special meal,’ I went to go put in their order and chef told me we were out of the Porterhouse Steak. I went back to the table to tell them I was sorry we were out of the steak but if they’d like to order something else I’d give them each a free dessert. All the sudden this woman went from being so sweet to total meltdown mode. She started crying (like sobbing) and she was shaking and stomping her feet. Then she stood up and and started literally screaming saying that we ruined her anniversary and how could we do this to her on her special day. Then she started in on her husband calling him a lowlife for being late and started degrading him saying she wished she’d never married him anyway and what a terrible husband he was. We finally got her to calm down and order something else and I swear the whole rest of her meal she was just getting drunk and was switching between either crying with her head down on the table or snarling at her husband. It was the worst temper tantrum I’ve ever seen by a woman old enough to be my mom (over a Porterhouse steak okay) and I felt so bad for her husband, he seemed totally abused and miserable. The whole thing was just bizarre.”
The Coke Vs. Pepsi Debate
“A woman lost her mind at the movie theater concession stand because they only sold Coca Cola beverages. ‘BUT I ONLY DRINK PEPSI! I can’t believe you don’t have Pepsi! What kind of business is this???’ This went on for several minutes. Then she demanded to speak to the manager, and insisted that she be refunded her ticket price BECAUSE SHE NEVER WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT IF SHE’D KNOWN THEY DIDN’T HAVE PEPSI! The manager refused to give her a refund. Of course she ends up in the same theater as me and my friends, and she whines to her friend the entire time leading up to the movie start. Then, you know the bit they play before the previews where they promote the concessions? Well, a giant Coke bottle goes up on the screen and she must have felt personally taunted because she yells, ‘SCREW COKE!’ Someone walked out of the theater and returned with an usher and the manager and she was escorted out, with her friend scurrying behind them. She had to have been in her 50s. Completely and utterly crazy.”
He Went Bananas
“In my mid-twenties, I was living in a pretty big house and splitting the rent with five other people. We had a communal kitchen, but the vegans (3 of ’em) kept their pans and utensils separate. No problem. And then I bought a blender. A month or so goes by, and one of my vegan roommates started a macrobiotic thing that I never fully understood, but involved a lot of blending. Lentils? In the blender. Parsnips and spinach? In the blender. Blackberries? Tofu? Beans and rice? In the blender. Everything he ate was room-temperature paste from the blender. I was completely cool with that as I put it in the kitchen for the household to use, myself included.
There was one reason I bought that blender, and one reason only: peanut butter banana smoothies. I love peanut butter banana smoothies. You peel a bunch of bananas, put them in the freezer, pull one out later and stick it in a blender with some peanut butter and some milk. Total perfection. I knew the blender was getting some heavy vegan mileage, so being the kind-hearted, conscientious person that I am, I used soy milk, no problem.
One day I was at the point of switching on the blender when my aforementioned roommate ambled into the kitchen, obviously dead set on another paste feed. He locked eyes with me and I saw panic rising in his face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s soy milk,’ I said, thinking the matter quickly resolved. The panic remained. It grew. His eyes widened and both of his hands rose in unison to grip fistfuls of hair at his temples, elbows akimbo. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’ He bellowed, knuckles white, hair follicles at their last extremity. ‘I’m making a smoothie, buddy, what’s up?’ Hands still buried in his hair, pulling at the temples, elbows pointed out at the walls, my roommate achieved a physical feat I have only ever witnessed in cartoons: he leapt into the air, both legs raising simultaneously, knees spread to the side, nearly reaching his chest repeatedly, with both of his feet timed to punctuate the words that followed. ‘YOU. CAN’T. PUT. BANANAS. IN. THE BLENDER!’ Around The ‘Bl’ in blender, he slipped but completed the word before he landed, hard. He maintained eye contact with me through the whole ordeal until the fall. While on the floor he regained eye contact and began raving incoherently about enzymes while pulling yams out of his grocery bag and tossing them around on the floor. I turned the blender on and made my smoothie. When I was done, he had gone to his room with his yams.”
Better Not Mention A Bomb In An Airport
“I used to work at Logan airport during the whole liquid ban. I worked checking people in for United. This guy started heading towards security with his soda, so I reminded him that he couldn’t bring it through and that security would take it away. He proceeds to go on a giant tirade against government interference and that I was some how personally responsible for taking all his freedoms alway. He then proceeded to yell that he had a bomb.
He was swiftly tackled by the soldiers we had patroling at that time.”
“She Had Opened All The Sauces To…”
“So I just started my shift at McDonald’s, it is 8:00 so we aren’t serving any lunch. This lady comes in and tries to order chicken nuggets. I tell her we do not have chicken nuggets until 10:30. She looks frustrated but accepts this news and leaves. So 10:30 rolls around, we are switching everything to lunch, and about 15 mins later the same lady comes in and orders 30 chicken nuggets. Okay cool, I put in the order, put her food on the tray and proceed to give her the nuggets. Now we give 2 sauces per 10 nuggets, and my boss was a stickler about this rule. Well, she wants like 15 sauces, I gave her more than I should have already and told her, ‘I can’t give you any more sauces.’ She flipped out, started yelling at me calling me every name in the book, so I walk away and get my manager. My manager comes, and she has opened all the sauces and nuggets and flips the tray over at my boss and now she is covered in sauce. My boss is an older Mexican lady, and she didn’t take nonsense from people, so she starts going off on the customer tells her to get out, and the cops are on the way (no one called yet). The lady leaves, and comes back with a taser, no joke, and starts to come around the counter. My boss got a broom, and they are in a stand off at the entrance into the employee area. Now the cops were called, and we are pretty close to the station so they get there in about 5, maybe ten minutes. The whole time the lady is trying to get over, and my boss is just waiting to smack her with the broom. Finally, she hears the sirens and tries to bolt but by then it was too late and she got arrested. Crazy times at that McDonald’s.”
“This Is A Crime Scene”
“I worked at a grocery store on Boylston St. during the Boston Marathon Bombings. Store was closed for an entire week, as the street was considered a crime scene. The day before we reopened, we were then (and only finally then) allowed to enter the store to get rid of the thousands and thousands of dollars of spoiled food, due to the store being shut and the power being cut. So once we opened the next day, we had hardly ANY perishable food: we got some things from another store, I believe. Because, ya know, crime scene. Cue woman FREAKING OUT for FAR too long about us not having the salad she wanted. The pre-made, terrible salad. Yelling about us having poor customer service. About how we can’t do our jobs. That we’re obviously being overpaid for our lack of effort at our jobs. She told someone to go back to school. Cue my manager basically saying ‘there were BOMBINGS a week ago, people DIED. Your salad is irrelevant.’ Woman goes red, obviously forgetting she was on the street of the crime scene and we had a more than reasonable excuse for lack of products. Shamefully, woman leaves, customers cheer.”
“She Got On Her Hands And Knees And…”
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“Worked at a Wendy’s for a few years during college. The meltdown of legend was when a little-league mom came in with the whole team of kids and ordered food for all of them and some of the parents. She then began to grow increasingly frustrated/visibly upset at the amount of time it took to prepare such a large volume of food. She begins to pointedly ask why her food was taking so long, over and over, each time her voice getting a little higher. After a few minutes, she starts saying, ‘This is simply unacceptable,’ and asked for a refund despite the fact that she can see the poor sandwich maker is standing right next to me working frantically to put all her cheeseburgers together. I say, ‘Okay, let me just get the manager.’ She then starts screeching she wants the refund NOW and throws her carrier tray of frosties onto the floor, gets down on her hands and knees, and I kid you not, proceeds to start grinding the spilled frosty into the carpet with her bare hands all the while shrieking as if her child had been run over in the drive-thru.”
Crazy Cookie lady
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“I work in a fairly popular bakery. Every Wednesday, we have a Crazy Sale, meaning one of our more popular items will be on a very nice sale. This Wednesday happened to be cookies. We were selling them for 75 cents and, as you can imagine, they sold very fast. Our bakers prepare for this, usually having five extra trays of cookies to sell. One of our most popular cookies sold out, but we couldn’t make more because we ran out of supplies for that kind. Most people were very understanding and just picked another cookie. Enter the crazy lady. She saw that slot for cookies was empty, so she asked if we had any more. I kindly said that no, we were out but the bakers just went off to get the supplies to make them and they should be ready within the hour. She went insane. She started screaming about how she needed them because she wanted to impress her friends. I suppose she was telling them she made them or something, I don’t know. She actually grabbed the cookie display and tipped it over, ruining our stock for the afternoon. She stomped on them all, saying how if she couldn’t get her cookies, no one could. She is now banned from the store and we keep the cookies behind the counter where only we can reach them.”
A Not So Merry Christmas
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“Last year my mom was pissed for a bunch of things and blew up on Christmas Eve (typical for most holidays). The main thing was that my mom was on some crazy diet and couldn’t eat like 99% of the stuff despite sneaking food and bringing her own stuff. The next morning my sister, dad and I decided to not let it ruin the holiday and started passing out the presents between the four of us. My mom came downstairs and wouldn’t talk to any of us. She finally came into the family room and we pointed out her chair, which had the presents from us to her. She walked over, placed her cereal down and started chucking all of her presents at the floor, wall, cats, whatever was around. Screamed that they were all terrible, she knew even without opening them, that we should still open our presents, that the presents from her were the only ones keeping that we didn’t deserve even terrible presents, on and on. I don’t like my mom.”
Frantic Cooking Teacher
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“In grade 8, the cooking teacher lost her cool because my group’s kitchen couldn’t find the right sized mixing bowl. She went through our entire kitchen, frantically opening every single drawer, as though a large mixing bowl would be hiding with the cutlery. She screamed at us for losing this precious mixing bowl, as though we stole her wedding ring and flushed it down the toilet. The rest of the class stopped making cookies to watch this short, fat French Canadian woman doing her impression of an angry tornado while shouting in Frenglish. Just as she was about to burst into tears, a kitchen group across the class found the mixing bowl. Turns out someone accidentally placed it in the wrong kitchen. A week later she shouted at us for an entire class because she found a grey hair in another class’s brownies. It was pretty obvious it was her hair.”
Margarita Madmen
“A guy, his wife, and a baby come into the restaurant I was working in. They order two Don Julio margaritas. Okay, no problem boss. They order two more. Their server has to leave for the day so they transfer the table to another server and at that point they order the $1 special margaritas. Sure. Check time comes, and they say they never ordered the Don Julio margs, only the special. Their server informed me before she left for the day that they kind of rubbed her the wrong way and to keep an eye on them (that’s server speak for ‘this guy’s gonna be a problem giving you a heads up’). I call her and ask her how he ordered the margaritas. She confirmed he specified Don Julio, so I told the guy he had to pay for them. I was the bartender and the manager on duty. He didn’t like that, so he threw down a $100 bill and I walked away to get his change. When I came back he was cussing me out, calling me names, yelled to the entire restaurant that we were ripping him off. His wife picked up the baby and called me names. He called me a prison guard – what – and I told them to please leave the premises. He called back later and said I was rude, cursed him out–that he was a doctor–and that he was going to sue me. Still waiting to get called into court on that one.”
All This For Serving His Sauce In The Wrong Container
“Used to work at McDonald’s. This guy ordered fries with a side of tartar sauce. We didn’t have any of the round sauce cups so we put the sauce in a nugget box. No biggie, right? Well, I was manning the front counter when this guy came storming up to the counter demanding to know why his tartar sauce is in a nugget box. I told him we were out of sauce cups. He demanded a sauce cup and I patiently explained again that we were out. So instead of acting like an adult and dealing with disappointment appropriately, he threw his entire box of fries at me and all over the counter and threw the box of tartar sauce on the ground and stormed out.”
Screaming At Subway
“Many years ago, when my sister and I were in high school, our dad was driving us home from the mall and stopped at Subway to get our mom a sandwich. It was a really nice day out, so my sister and I rolled down the windows and chatted while we waited for dad to come out. All of a sudden the Subway door flies open and this lady comes storming out with her boyfriend in tow, ranting about ‘They can’t treat you like that!’ and generally acting unhinged while her boyfriend tried to calm her down. I really wanted to make a snide comment about it to my sister, but they were standing like five feet from our car, the windows were rolled down, and I was afraid this lady would attack me if she heard me say it. A couple of minutes later dad comes out with mom’s sandwich, I ask him what that was all about, and he says that the cashier had politely asked the boyfriend to stop swearing as there were children in the room, and the lady had flipped out and started screaming and breaking things.”
“You Could See And Smell The Smoke”
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“I used to work at a grocery store. I once watched a lady go into a screaming, swearing fit because we wouldn’t let her into the meat department to buy sausages because that section had been blocked off by the fire department. There were three or four firefighters there, in plain view of the woman, in turnouts, tearing apart one of our refrigerator units because the motor had started smoldering. You could see and smell the smoke. Lady screamed at my supervisor for five minutes before one of the firefighters came over and literally told the woman to screw off, which absolutely made my day. Our store manager sent the fire station a giant gift basket afterward.”
Not A Solid Argument
“A guy once threw a tantrum about not being served while being served. Was at work closing the doors at exactly closing hour (maybe 30-45 seconds early). I see a car pull up in front and I wait at the door for whoever it is to come in. A woman comes inside, and I close the door behind her which is what we normally do when we start closing. .02 seconds later her boyfriend comes up to the door and starts banging on it yelling at me to let him in. I open the door calmly and nicely and this guy just starts yelling at me and my coworker about how Google said we were supposed to be open until 10 but yet we were closing at 7. The sign outside clearly said 7 o clock but whatever. He went on threatening to call our boss and get us fired. Yeah, have fun with that since he’s the guy who told us to close at this time. While we were trying to calm him down, his girlfriend told my coworker to shut up. All of this was of course happening while we were actually SERVING them. After we told him that he’s free to call our boss anytime if he has any complaints or concerns, he proceeds to take his phone out and threatens to film us and put it on Facebook. At this point, I was so confused that I started laughing, then I told him that there were cameras in every corner of the restaurant so we’re quite used to being filmed.”
Wholesome Values
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“When I got fired from a family friendly restaurant (for unfair reasons, but it doesn’t matter much anymore) the two co-owners were very formal and I accepted the termination as gracefully as terminations come. But then the owner’s wife opened her mouth. She started screaming about how I was sleeping with coworkers and I didn’t follow their good wholesome Christian values and I was sleazy and such (funny when none of it was true). When I brought up the fact I wasn’t actually sleeping with coworkers, she got red in the face and continued yelling, spitting in my face and waving her arms around dramatically. It only got worse when I said it wasn’t quite appropriate for them to make us pray before meetings and force their religious views on their employees either. At that point, her husband comes in to defend their actions and I just walked out, eyes rolling.”
