You have way more chances to get back at shitty customers doing food service.
Get a cunty customer and you just smile a little too large, be a little too eager to fix their issue and let your eyes glint just a little. Then fix their issue exactly what they asked for with nothing wrong with it and untampered with. When you return to the table put a little too much emphasis on “Enjoy” when you give it to them.
They will spend the entire meal trying to figure out what you did or call the manager over and make a big scene about how you did something but cant point out what. Ruin my night, I’ll ruin yours.
Right so in the jumpscare genre you use psychological trick, and in the psych horror genre you use jumpscares on shoplifters and bad customers who can wait an extra minute for their help.
You don’t have to jump out on them, though. One time I had this guy SCREAMING about his order when there was a huge line and he was like #3, yeah? Well he was there for about an hour and while he was ranting at 300Db about how I never do my job yards yadda I had a colleague go get his fridge. He was waiting for that hour impatiently and I kept reassuring my team this would be worth the wait.
Anyhow he goes and gets someone to fetch their supervisor so I walk up once I’d been called.
WHERE IS MY ORDER IVE BEEN HERE FOR 2 HOURS‽‽
sir by my account, you’ve been leaning on it for the last 45 minutes. Your order is already completed in the system and the invoice is printed and on top of the box, do you need help loading it or finding anything else today?
He just screams like Tarzan and starts to push it outside. 5 minutes later quietly shows back up in my now-much-shorter line and sheepishly asks for help loading it.
TLDR: I also like to play ‘ruin my night, I ruin yours.’
Or you could also just actually fuck with their food ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
10+ years and I only ever did it to one person, but that racist piece of shit 100% deserved it.
That’s risky (criminal level risky)
I heard some pretty stupid shit working retail.
“Where can I find the crunchy ice cream?”
“Uh… Like, the Nestle Crunch bar ice creams?”
“No, it was just plain vanilla ice cream. But crunchy.”
“Do you guys have any sour cream that isn’t refrigerated?”
“If this is only 2% milk, what is the other 98%?”
Looking at a collection of LOTR books shortly after the first Peter Jackson film released
“Wow! How do they already have 3 books of just 1 movie?”
Lemme at the guy about the milk, lemme at him, I wanna explain some shit to that guy, hey guy how much fuckin time you got pal, I wanna tell you about how cows work
I wanna know how cows work
The 2% refers to the amount of fat in the milk. Whole milk is usually something like 3-4%. So 2% milk actually is the “other 98% of the milk” since they skimmed half the fat off. Milkfat is actually not bad for you either*, vitamin d is fat-soluble and taking the extra milkfat out can make it harder for you body to absorb it.
Fat is also flavor, and when it comes to something like yogurt you have to put something else in so it won’t taste like shit. That something is usually sugar. For the same flavor yogurt its usually at least double the amount in the fat free variety. And it still tastes like shit if you ask me.
*the dose is the poison, if you eat nothing but cheese you will die of congestive heart failure
IME customers fucking hate it when you infodump on them when they ask questions like this
No, I know how milk works, I wanna know how cows work
Oh, cows are quite simple. They eat silage and turn it into milk, beef, methane, and more cows. Male cows don’t produce milk. Steers turn all the silage they eat into beef. Bulls turn 1% of what they eat into cum and the rest is used to produce pure, unadulterated rage.
Aw yeah, that’s the stuff
I wish to know more about silage
It’s like a fermented mash of grain and grass. It’s a good way to turn corn into better feed. Unfortunately that’s as much as your getting out of me while I’m hung over.
If this is only 2% milk, what is the other 98%?
Reminds me of 10% free
“Do you guys have any sour cream that isn’t refrigerated?”
How is that a stupid question?
https://www.finefoodgroup.com/tool/en/products/cheese-and-sour-cream/che/sour-cream-uht/cd04a
Because unless it’s a powdered mix thing, sour cream (and almost all dairy) in the US is refrigerated for food safety. They were not looking for a powder or mix.
It’s just UHT. UHT dairy is very much legal in the US. And does not have to be refrigerated. It often is, because unrefrigerated milk makes US consumers uneasy. But it doesn’t have to be.
I am aware that it’s less common than it is in Europe. But it’s not an unreasonable question.
Every question is unreasonable if you hate people.
TBH like a half of those questions is something I could ask when I was younger, and the other half might have been asked by my friends when they were high. I hope I didn’t upset the retail workers too much…
Its less upsetting and more baffeling
Like I’m not mad, usually confused and intrigued by the question.
Unless you’re being a dick about it.
Did you ever find out what the first person was looking for? Is crunchy vanilla an actual thing or did they just want ice cream with larger ice crystals?
Likely not real ice cream, but the cheaper (and more common) ice milk - it has a lower fat content, so more water, and in certain conditions ice crystals do form into small chunks.
Food service is worse.
So many rules and you’re stressed out by management that feels 2 people can run an entire restaurant themselves.
Am in management, let me tell you, we fill out all those positions. My boss returns the schedule to me with 1/3rd the number of people i put on it. It’s a nightmare
I’m also in management, and, yeah. Trying to get everything done with such little labour is a nightmare and I end up picking up all the extra work. I don’t want my staff to have to stay late so I do. I’m yet to leave work on time.
Two people? What do you need two people for? You make the food and then you give it to the customer, it’s not rocket surgery! Now get to it you lazy bum!
Love your additude. These fast food bumbs need to be taught their place.
Frontline tech support is a serbian film
Come And See.
FWIW, if one’s foodservice experience is bartending, you are given significantly more license to stand your ground and kick people out. Legally defensible license to do so. I genuinely enjoyed bartending most of the time, especially when it wasn’t a high-volume place.
When it’s at a bar/grill restaurant, if you and the cook don’t run tag-team being bad-cop on every table that gets weird to spare the server staff, you’re doing it wrong. You are a weapon to be wielded. A 6-top often loves the suggestion that someone not getting a tip is a mutual villain making drama and that the server is the only person making magic happen against all odds. It’s theater, right? You provide dinner and a show.
I have worked in food service and retail and to tell the truth I would choose “picking up shit with a shovel” over either any day of the week. Wouldn’t even blink, give me the fucking shovel no problem boss
When I worked retail, that also included cleaning the bathrooms (who needs janitors when you have minimum wage kids!), so I got the worst of all worlds. And I’d still much prefer that over doing call center work every again.
(lifeless voice) “Thank you for choosing AT&T”
Worse, it was AOL.
special case, Walmart is Cronenberg levels of body horror.
keep in mind, it gets worse the darker it is outside.
I’d sooner chew my pinky finger off than ever work in food service again. I’m dead serious.
Dead. Fucking. Serious.
My first job was in food service so I figured, ok, this is what working is like. Never again.
To me the worse job is to be the one telling people “your insurance will not cover you” despair anger disbelief denial cries and shouts. They had to replace the glass doors for acrylic and the desk for metal ones. Some people gets fucking mad. I was only the IT guy but daaayuuummm that shit looked rough…
For me food service was worse because it was harder to get breaks. In retail I could just tell bad customers “I’ll check the warehouse”, and then never return. But at the restaurant I couldn’t opt out of bad customers.
My wife did both in a Californian suburb and this is accurate in that retail will make you lose faith in humanity while waiting tables is actually kinda fun but very tiring.
In her case, it wasn’t the Karens but rather the amount of terrible parenting she would witness. One kid shamelessly stole thousands of dollars of Pokemon cards, get caught, and the mother took his side and blamed the store (?!). Plus, so many kids just left there like it’s a fucking daycare, too. Touching and messing up stuff. My wife was working alone most of the time, too!
Not to mention, no chair, no real breaks, minimum pay, and so on. At least with food service, good places have tips and you get to bring home food. If you sell alcohol, it’s extremely lucrative in states that don’t dock your pay. An occasional jump scare is worth making more than an average college grad, and one of her friends opened a sushi place and gives us a discount. Food service is cool.
I bet that the question depends more on management than the customers or type of work.
Like a good manager that doesn’t take shit from customers will be way better than the ones that bend over backwards for any complaint.
Same thing for the ones who are chill as long as things are getting done vs the one that is more interested in seeing the illusion of work being done even if things are neglected (because all their attention is making sure people look busy rather than really understanding the work to evaluate results).
The quality of management is near universal, that’s the problem. They don’t pay enough to keep good people
I worked both. Distant stare
Ah… miss those times I see?
For me retail was terrible, fast food was a special type of hell. But working as a busser was far and away the worst and strangest work experience I’ve ever had
What was strange about it?
Nasty customers leaving messy tables. Host/server breathing down your neck to bus their section yesterday. Dishwasher disappeared so they need you to pitch in at the dish sink. The bin behind the bar is overflowing.
Where were you?!
Hosts flat seat -> server workflow gets frontloaded -> servers spend all their time greeting and grabbing drinks/setups instead of prebussing -> bussers have to do more work to get a table guest ready -> hosts start to panic as the lobby fills up -> hosts yell at bussers to teleport around the restaurant as soon as a guest so much as thinks about the check -> repeat
All of this just barely works until someone drops a glass in the ice, or we get behind on a starter, or a piece of equipment breaks, or literally anything goes wrong. And that’s just front of house, when you factor in the drama that can happen back of house when we’re understaffed and FOH demands too much too quickly it’s a miracle that there aren’t mass walkouts.
I live in the death spiral. I have a different seat but we’re all on the same damn ride.
Everything those other fellows mentioned, plus great stuff like: the manager making me shave my facial hair off before allowing me to work; getting put on 12-hr shifts back to back even though they knew I was a student and had classes; staff expecting me to know everything about the table numbers and layout on my first day and getting pissed when I didn’t; also the amazing capitalist culture of Trying Super Hard So I’ll Be A Line Chef/Mgr One Day and all that comes with it.
I quit after two days and never looked back.
Walmart gave me constant illness and depression, fast food has just given me grey hairs and chest pain
Which one do you prefer?
Neither
