Working in the food service industry can be a drag, especially when the "customer is always right." As we all know, they definitely AREN'T, and when the rare opportunity to call them on their
When I Informed Her That We Were Closed…
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“My folks used to own a Tastee Freez in South Carolina and I worked in it most summers as a teenager. Since it was a small town, everyone knew each other and most went to the same church.
One Sunday night, one of the ladies from church called in at about five minutes after 10 and tried to order a 20-piece chicken nugget (nevermind that she called them McNuggets), and when I informed her that we closed at 10 and the grill and fryers were already cleaned and closed for the night, she got irate with me. She started yelling in my ear about how she knew the owners of the place and she was going to get me fired and did I know who I was talking to.
I calmly replied that yes, Mrs. Greene, I knew exactly who I was talking to since my parents and I lived right across the street from her and she had asked us in church that morning what time we closed for the night. We were never on speaking terms again.”
How He Deals With Smokers In Supermarkets
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“A customer was smoking in a supermarket. My staff member asks the customer to stop smoking but the customer refuses to stop. The customer escalates to me (I was the customer service manager at the time).
I grabbed a large fire extinguisher, walked up to the customer and said, ‘If you don’t put the cigarette out now, I will be forced to assume you’re on fire and act accordingly.’
The customer dropped the cigarette, stamped it out with her foot, and left the store.”
He Should Not Have Asked Him If He Knew That Street
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“At a pizza delivery joint, a customer called claiming we were late with our delivery. We possibly were, but he then pointlessly asked, ‘Do you even know where Abercrombie Road IS?!’
Actually, yes, I did know where it was. It was a famous ‘landmark’ road. But not just that, I was standing right next to a great wall-map of the town that we always refer to, and was able to say:
‘Certainly, I do. Abercrombie Road is one of the three parallel main roads which cross the fine town of Derpville. At nearly two miles long, Abercrombie Road is one of the shorter main roads in the immediate area, but from its origin at Derp Plaza it offers the motorist or pedestrian scenic views of Derpy Park, which blend seamlessly into the suburbs of Derpington, St. Derpert’s High School and the cenotaph commemorating the Battle of Derp. It then terminates at the agricultural center on the outskirts of town. It is a road known to all and is an experience that even the most casual visitor to the town of Derpville should not miss.
Now, before the call continues, I have to know, does that answer to your complete satisfaction the question about whether or not I know where Abercrombie Road is?’
The guy just said ‘Yeah’ and left it at that.
I said ‘Then expect your order to arrive shortly with our apologies. Rest assured that any tardiness was not the result of a lack of geographic knowledge of the area. Thank you for calling Derp’s Pizza!’
And I hung up.”
People Always Pretended They Knew The Owner
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“I used to work at a restaurant chain that started about 15 or 20 years ago and has about 15 stores in total. People would complain all the time and release their vague threat ‘I know Tommy! (The owner of the chain) Do I have to call him to get some good service?’ So much BS from so many people, but we had to put up with it because that’s what you do in the restaurant business.
But one time when this happened, Tommy was actually in the restaurant. He would come in once every couple months or so and just act like a regular customer, just to kind of evaluate how things were running from a non-owner perspective.
Anyway, this lady (that had been totally rude the entire night) starts complaining, talking about how her meal was cold or bad or something, even though she had powered through most of it. She wanted her money back for ‘this atrocity!’ Then she drops the bombshell: ‘I know Tommy! He wouldn’t stand for this!’ The only thing was, Tommy was sitting almost directly behind her and pretty obviously didn’t know her.
After getting a bit of the old discrete ‘Go ahead’ nod from him, I just said ‘Ma’am, Tommy is in the restaurant right now. If you could just point him out, I’d be glad to let him know what you think of his restaurants.’
She stammered, gave the ‘No he’s not, I would’ve seen him!’ until Tommy stood up and said hello. He put on the kind of sickly sweet personality, where you’re ever so polite but a total jerk at the same time. She shut up and paid pretty quickly after that.”
DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
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“I used to work at an amusement park. I started in food, which was by far, the worst of the four details (food, games, rides, pavilions). My stand made funnel cakes and corndogs. The average wait time on a busy day could be upwards of 30 minutes in the sun, which I’ll admit sucks. It’s not any cooler in the stand slaving over a 450-degree fryer.
Anyhow, this guy comes up, orders four corndogs. I ring him up and ask him if he wants any ketchup or mustard brushed on. He declines. I take his money and hand over four corndogs. His little girl bites into one and then tugs on daddy’s arm and says she wants mustard. I politely inform him that since she’s already bitten out of her food, we can’t brush it on; however, if he’d head 50 steps to an adjacent building, he could skip the line and just grab some condiment packets.
Apparently, this was unacceptable. Up until this point, he was just a normal guy, suddenly, anger. ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I WORK FOR?! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!?’
I tell him no. He then half-chuckles to himself and points out his pregnant wife sitting at a nearby table and then begrudges the time he spent in line. I again reassure him they will give him some mustard packets if he walks next door. He loses it.
‘I’m the regional whatever for Coca-Cola in this area. I will buy and sell your read-end, kid!’
“This self-aggrandizing and demeaning talk towards me lasted a full 60 seconds or so. Then I tell him ‘we only carry Pepsi products.'”
She Opens The Taco In Front Of The Cashier
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“I was at a Taco Bell once. This real trashy lady was at the counter complaining that there was no sour cream on her taco. She opens it in front of the cashier (a sassy woman) and the sour cream is immediately visible.
The trashy lady says, ‘Well, why the heck is it underneath all the lettuce and stuff?’
To which the sassy cashier responds, ‘It’s called gravity, ma’am. It makes stuff go on top of other stuff.’
One Idiot Says I Didn’t Bring Her Anything Right
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“When I was a server, I was the kind everyone claims they would always be if they become a server in a restaurant. I filled up glasses when they needed to be refilled without asking, I brought out a bowl of lemons if you asked for lemons, and if you wanted extra ice, you got a whole extra glass full of ice. I was even OCD enough to write down every order even though I could easily memorize it and get it right.
One particularly busy night I’m working a party of about 20 people. It’s a Friday night and the kitchen is slammed. Everything was going smoothly, or so I thought until I bring out the drinks and salads. There is one idiot that starts off saying I didn’t bring her anything right (wrong dressing, the drink had a lemon, too much ice, etc). I play the gracious and apologetic server correcting the issue despite knowing she is wrong.
The meal comes out and she explodes into a tirade of expletives about how I can’t seem to do anything right and what a screw up I am. I proceed to congratulate her on the fine example she is setting for the kids at the table on how to treat another human being, and what classy language she was using.
I then proceeded to show her where I wrote down everything she asked for, the type of salad, the dressing she wanted, how she wanted it on the side, pulled the straw I gave her from under her bread plate and told her that I did give her one, and even how when she heard that her sister had ordered another dish and she told her sister that she wanted that dish instead she maybe should have simply asked for me to change the order instead of trying to play it off as if I was truly a screw up as she claimed and maybe next time she would do a better job of making sure the server was not in earshot when she says something like that.
I then told her that I would go and have the kitchen fix the meal she really wanted, instead of the one she ordered, and that it would take about 10 minutes before it was ready.
Needless to say, the whole table was quiet except for her father who simply said, ‘Honey, it’s about time someone called you out on your BS.’
The old man gave me a $100 tip when he paid for the meal, a strong handshake, and a ‘thanks.'”
She Yelled That It Wasn’t A Fair Price
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“I used to work as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. One busy Saturday, an older lady came through my long line with about $150 worth of groceries. Among her items was a prepackaged piece of meat from our deli department that is normally priced by weight. Her meat didn’t have a printed sticker on the package and I would’ve needed to find a bag boy or manager to run to the deli to get it priced. Because we were super busy, I decided to wing it and set it on my scale.
‘Looks like it’s almost a pound, so let’s say $2.77? Does that sound fair?’ I began to ring it as a miscellaneous item.
‘No it does NOT sound fair!’ she yelled. ‘You need to get that priced!’
Groans from the line began behind her, as I found a bag boy to run to get the price sticker. A manager came by to see what the commotion was about and the lady explained the situation. I explained why I had made the decision I made. The manager, of course, stuck up for the lady (which we laughed about later) and she accepted the apology. We then waited for what seemed like an eternity of eye-contact avoidance and thumb twiddling.
The bag boy came back and handed me the pork. I smirked and showed her the price.
‘$2.78. Huh, I would’ve saved you a penny!’ The man behind her chortled. Never saw her again.”
Onion Lady Needed To Be Taught A Lesson
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“During high school, I worked at a Burger King. There was this one lady who would always come into drive-thru during the afternoon and ask for a Whopper Jr. with extra onions. And I mean, a LOT of extra onions. And no matter how many we put in, she always came into the store and complained that there weren’t enough. Still, this was in the middle of the afternoon, so we didn’t care.
However, one day, we had four buses full of U.S. Army enlistees at the store at the same time (convoys of chartered buses would go by periodically and they usually stopped at our store because the bus drivers knew my boss).
Now, these people were always the nicest, most respectful people you can possibly imagine, which was a welcome change after dealing with jerks the whole day. They also always ordered a crap ton of food – all king size, tons of double and triple Whoppers, the whole nine yards. My boss would always have me give them the ‘senior discount’ (15% off), and they enjoyed that immensely.
Anyways, nice as they were, they strained our store to the limit because they ordered so much food. So we were really working hard to keep up, and then onion lady comes into the drive-thru. My boss told me to just grab two handfuls of onions and put them on the sandwich because she didn’t need a scene when we were as far behind as we were. I could barely close the wrapper because of the onions, but I managed it and we gave it to her.
Now, the store is completely full of U.S. Army enlistees and the line was out the door. So onion lady pushes her way past all of these people, rudely shoving them out of her way, and comes up to the counter screaming that she didn’t have enough onions. My boss is peeved, so she takes the sandwich, hands it to me, and tells me to do whatever the heck I want with it.
I dumped the ENTIRE FREAKING TUB of onions on the burger (probably about 1.5 LITERS of onions), and wrapped it up really, REALLY tight, and taped it shut. My boss hands it to the lady and she opens it right on the counter to ‘make sure we have enough’ (even though it’s like six times larger than normal).
The thing EXPLODED ALL OVER. So freaking awesome. All the troops were trying not to laugh. One of their officers was waiting by the counter for his food, and finally, he just gave up and started laughing his tail off. The troops took this as a cue, and she had about 250 troops all dying laughing at her. One of the best days of my high school life.
She didn’t come back for a month, and she never EVER complained about not having enough onions.”
The Workers Thought He Couldn’t Understand Them
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“My roommates and I decided to go grab some Subway before we went out one Friday night. One of them is half-Ecuadorian, and the Subway employees were both Hispanic.
While I was in the process of ordering my sandwich, the two workers were speaking to each other in Spanish. When it was my friend’s turn, he ordered in Spanish, which I thought was simply a gesture. I couldn’t figure out why both employees looked like ghosts and stammered their way through the entire ordering process.
When I got back in the car, my friend said what the two workers said: ‘Look at this effing pretty boy, pretending to be cultured. What a jerk, he doesn’t even know the language.’
At which point my friend decided to place his entire order in Spanish and thank them at the end of the transaction.”
I CAN’T EAT THAT MUCH!
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“My friend was in line at KFC when a rather large woman began rattling off a long order. I’m talking two family buckets of extra crispy, sides, biscuits, bowls of gravy, you name it. At the end of the order, the female cashier asks the woman, ‘For here or to go?’
The woman blows a gasket and screams, ‘WHAT! I CAN’T EAT THAT MUCH!’
To which the cashier replies, without the slightest bit of hesitancy, ‘LADY, I DON’T KNOW YOUR LIFE.’
It was the most boss thing that has ever occurred in a KFC, to my knowledge.”
Another Customer Stood Up For The Barista
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“I work in an extremely busy coffee shop and deal with large numbers of irate customers.
One day this guy comes in while we are swamped and everyone is visibly moving as fast as they can to help everyone out. One of the managers begins taking his order and then gets called out to help on the machine in the middle of it. He waits for the customer to finish letting him know what it was he wanted and relayed that to the nearest coworker who had just finished with her customer. This is a new girl, who had just started barely a week before this point, and she is actually very good at what she does. The problem in this situation lies in the fact that she is new to the country and learning English. She has a good command over the language (she is Filipino, and this is in Canada, so it’s not uncommon to run into people with heavy accents, to begin with).
As she finishes up repeating the order back to him and asking if there was anything else she could help him with, he stands there with this stupid look on his face and says, ‘What the heck did you just say?’
She just stands there for a second, kind of stunned at his reaction, and he immediately jumps on her spouting all kinds of ignorant BS about her not being able to speak English and she shouldn’t be here, and he deserves to be served by someone who can actually help him etc.
To paint a bit of a picture, this guy was about 6’2″, pretty built and probably seemed intimidating to the poor girl. Immediately as he starts laying into her, this huge man behind him gets right in his face, and says ‘What is your effing problem? Shes obviously trying to help you, you ignorant mother effer. I don’t give a crap what you say, keep that to yourself, that’s just plain ignorant. Actin’ like a jerk and all, you ignorant piece of crap.’
It stopped him in his tracks and he had nothing else to say the whole time he was waiting for his order to be filled. You could visibly see that he felt embarrassed, maybe not so much for the way he acted, but because he got chewed out by some hardcore guy who could have and I’m sure would have stomped his butt for being such a jerk. The whole time the second guy is making remarks also about how someone could be so stupid, telling us that he knows we can’t say anything. I think he got his order for free, but I’m not entirely sure. He definitely got a lot of appreciative looks from all of us behind the counter.
Want to know what the kicker is? This jerk’s wife is Asian. I’ve seen her around a few times and she speaks such broken English that I have a hard time understanding her myself. It’s a pretty chilling realization when you think about how someone could treat a complete stranger like that.”
Is That Enough Honey Mustard For You?
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“I used to work at a deli.
One day, this lady comes in and rudely orders her food. I told her that everything should come out all right and that I will double check for her to make sure her order would be correct. She insisted on getting lots of honey mustard on her sandwich. I typed in extra honey mustard on the ticket. Sure enough, her order comes out and there seemed to be plenty of honey mustard there.
But when I deliver it, she yells at me for not having the extra honey mustard I promised her and told me to ‘freaking get a ton more honey mustard’ for her. I go to the back of the store, get an entire new gallon jug of honey mustard and plop it on her table. Her friends were laughing and she was steaming mad.
She complained to the manager who thought it was hilarious and actually laughed in her face.”
15 Or 20 Minutes Go By And Her Husband Calls
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“I work at Jimmy John’s.
At Jimmy John’s, it’s mostly self-service, you get your napkins, and if you need a bag, you get them yourself. Our sandwiches are wrapped in a way that you generally don’t need one, and everything is made ‘to go.’ A lady came in one day and ordered four or five sandwiches. As always, I redirect them to the end of the bar to pick up their sandwiches and grab whatever napkins and bags they want.
Now, if someone asks us to bag something for them, we will. People generally don’t (unless they’re really old in which case we’ll do it for them regardless), but nobody minds if they do. This lady never asked once for someone to bag her food. She stood at the bar, quiet, bagging all of her sandwiches up and then left. About 15 or 20 minutes go by and her husband calls the store and asks to speak to a manager (ME). I pick up the phone and the conversation goes like this, mostly verbatim:
ME: ‘My name is XXXX, how can I help you?’
GUY: (Shouting) ‘Yeah, since when is it yall’s policy for people to bag their own food? My wife just came from there and told me she had to bag everything herself!’
ME: ‘I’m sorry sir, but it’s technically always been our policy. Everything is self-service here at Jimmy John’s. We certainly would have…’ (He cuts me off).
GUY: ‘WELL I’M GOING TO BE SURE TO TELL EVERYONE I KNOW ABOUT THE KIND OF SERVICE YOU GUYS OFFER OVER THERE.’
ME: ‘Okay, well, thanks, I guess? I mean, it isn’t any sort of secret.’
He hangs up.”
