Fast food workers and retail employees share stories of some of the worst customers they've ever encountered and how they got what was coming to them. Karma for the win!
The confused pizza customer
“I was standing at the counter of the pizza place I work at when this lady storms in and slams a pizza on the counter. ‘This isn’t the f*cking pizza I ordered, what the hell are you going to do about it?’ she asked. I looked at the pizza, then at my buddy Nick and turned back to her and said, ‘nothing.’ She then went on a long rant, telling us how we were going to be fired, how stupid and incompetent we were; she actually told me I must be retarded, then asked why the hell we weren’t going to do anything? I said, ‘Because that pizza came from the pizza shop across the street.’ I think she actually shrunk in size as she slunk out, looking so pathetic and beaten I almost felt bad for laughing till tears dripped down my face.”
The trashy customer
“I was working the late night shift at the McDonalds’ window. Guy ordered whatever and pulled up to the window. I was cooking and handling the window at the same time, so I wasn’t there when the customer pulled up. When I walked up to the window, I didn’t see all the trash in his lap. I opened the window to take his card and he threw a bag of trash at me. I took a step back, bothered that I just had trash thrown at me, and watched his car speed off. I was pissed, but there was nothing I could do. A couple seconds later, I heard a small bang of metal on metal. I walked to the lobby and looked out the windows. The douchebag had slammed into a police cruiser who was about to loop around and use the drive thru himself. Of course I also went to tell the officer what had just happened inside.”
The angry lady with connections
“Worked at Best Buy 10 or so years ago. It was Black Friday and most of the customers were in bad moods since they’d been waiting hours to come in and stand in more lines. But this one lady was a raging b*tch. After yelling at everyone in my department about how she NEEDED the laptop that was on sale despite the fact that it was sold out, she proceeded to tell us she’ll have the store closed down because she ‘works with the city and knows the fire marshall and we have too many people in the store.’ So she calls him, we tell her to leave, and nothing happens to the store. However we called them as well to report what she’d said, and she got fired from her job for abuse of power.”
Next time, just wait your turn, sir…
“I was a cashier at a grocery store. This guy with a full cart b_tched and bullied employees until he was allowed to use my express checkout because he didn’t want to wait in the regular lines, and my line only had two people in it. As soon as my floor manager allowed him to use express checkout and he had his cart unloaded, a tiny old lady with a walker who could barely stand got in line behind him. Everyone gave him dirty looks. He realized he f_cked up and tried to make a joke about it. Dead silence. I hope his saved time was worth being an a**hole.“
18-year-old boys are the worst…and so are their dads.
“I worked for an online banking help desk and this 18-year-old guy called saying he had seen a transaction for $7 to allpay.net and didn’t recognize it. He decided the bank was stealing his $7 and that I was in on it and called me a ‘thieving little prick.’ Then he got his dad on the phone, who stuck up for his sh_tty son, saying I was a pathetic scumbag for stealing $7 off an 18-year-old boy, even though it was a debit card transaction and I simply worked in the department which helped people use online banking. Anyway, I phoned our debit card services to see if they could give any more information, and boy could they. I then had the pleasure of calling back this little sh_t’s equally sh*tty father and said the following: ‘Hi sir, thanks for holding. I’ve checked with our debit card services team, and I now understand why your son would not have recognized the payee allpay.net. That’s a deliberately vague term used for discretion when the customer has subscribed to online pornography. That’s what it was for. Your son has been paying for online pornography. Would you like to pop him back on the phone so I can tell him it’s a payment for his pornography, or will you pass on the information?’ The father just muttered that the issue did not require any further investigation, thanked me for looking into it, and hung up.”
Best. Kid. Ever.
“I currently work at a consignment shop. We have two stories of furniture, and it’s only things people bring in for us to sell for some of the profit. A lady came in with her son (he was 5 or 6) and she looked around. We had two bar-stools and she came up to the desk and said ‘I’d like to order two more of these bar-stools.’ I smiled and said ‘We can’t do that, those belong to someone and that’s all they had to consign with us.’ She looked back and said, ‘Well, why the f_ck can’t you order ones like this?! I’m sure you can find them online!’ I clenched my teeth and smiled again and said, ‘Ma’am we really can’t do that. If you’d like to go online you are more than welcome to look for yourself, but I can’t help you and I’m sorry.’ She huffed and started walking to the door, talking about getting me fired and what a horrible store it was. She then got a nice big face-full of door. It’s a push door and it was locked. She looked at me and screamed, “WHY THE F_CK IS THIS LOCKED?” I had no idea. Then her son looked at her and said, ‘Mommy you were mean to that lady and I don’t wanna go till you say sorry.’ Best. Kid. Ever.”
The crazy clearance guy
“Used to work at Best Buy. One week we had an advertised clearance sale on a discontinued item. Guy comes in already irritated because his GPS took him to the wrong place (totally my fault, right?). He wanted to buy the clearance item but we were already out of stock and since it was discontinued I couldn’t order him a new one. Company policy at the time was for me to offer to sell him the display unit at an even greater discount. He immediately flipped out and started screaming and cursing at me about ‘bait and switch.’ Threatened to call the cops because he thought it was illegal and got in my face like he was going to hit me. This guy was half my size and dressed like Woody Allen in ‘Annie Hall’ —the textbook definition of physically non-threatening. So I laughed at him and told him to go ahead and call the cops. The police heard his insane tone and agitated demeanor and immediately sent an officer to remove him from the store. So basically this guy got so mad and crazy that he called the police on himself.”
The rude dog owner
“Even though we’re not technically a grocery store, we don’t allow pets. One dude tried to power walk past the employee at the entrance door, holding a big pit bull puppy on a leash. We stopped him and told him he couldn’t bring his dog inside and he LOST IT. Told us he’s our best customer and that he’s here 5 times a week and he owns stock, blah. Whatever. He demanded to know why we don’t allow dogs. We explained how it’s a food safety issue, especially with an untrained puppy. At this point our manager came over and just waved him through (because the customer’s always right). Well, not even 5 minutes later this dog squats in the middle of the main aisle and pees, followed by poop. The man turned so red and dragged the dog towards the exit, abandoning his groceries. We stopped him and asked him nicely to please clean up after his pup. ‘That’s the reason we don’t allow them, sir.'”
The underaged jerk
“This guy came in the store and was being a complete a**hole. Didn’t want to show ID to buy beer even though he looked 20 at the oldest, was constantly yelling and swearing. He also had parked in the handicap spot despite not having handicap tags or plates on his car. One of my regular customers, who is a sheriff’s deputy, was also in the store. He saw how the guy was acting. Saw where he was parked. Went out, got his ticket book, and wrote the guy a ticket. Finally, the guy realized he wasn’t going to get his beer, went outside…to find he was getting ticketed. I could not stop laughing.”
You know what they say about guys with really big trucks…
“I was working drive thru at a Tim Hortons and some a**hole in a massive black truck parked too far away from the window and expected me to lean super far out to give him his change. He was super impatient and just really rude. I just shook my head and so he got all pissed off and finally got out of the truck and the door shut behind him. It was locked and he sat there for like 15 minutes and we had to call a tow truck. Sure, it pissed off everyone behind him but at least they were all pissed off at him and not us. He acted like it was the biggest embarrassment of his life.”
The lady with the broken iPhone
“Worked at a telecom in Canada (I am no longer an employee thank god). Lady came in with a broken iPhone and demanded to get a new one for free. If you don’t know, in Canada the iPhone 6s is going for about $400 upfront on a two-year contract at a minimum $80 plan. She had a good plan, but wanted it for free. She called up our loyalty team in store and spent the next two hours screaming at them. Finally, they agree to a deal and she gets it for zero. She looks at me and says that doesn’t want a case, and that AppleCare is a scam. (We worked on commission, so this essentially meant I was getting nothing and was ruining my numbers). She kept telling me to hurry up through the setup and I was trying to work as fast as possible. When I finished, she grabbed the phone and marched off, saying I was a terrible employee. She got three steps out of the store and dropped the phone. Shattered screen, and white screen of death. She ran back in, asking what I could do. I shrugged and went, ‘Sorry, but AppleCare sure would have helped, eh?'”
The car thief
“I work at an auto parts store. This one guy stole some $60 headlights and literally sprinted out the door. We went to look outside to try and get his license plate, just in time to see him speed off, hit a curb, and blow out his tire. Called the cops and the dumba** got arrested and had to have his car towed.”
Maybe next time she’ll think twice before complaining…
“This lady lays into me for the amount of the bill, called me every bad word in the english language. Says we over-billed her and requested I go through her order. So I do and I discover that we under-billed her by a $1000 due to a misplaced zero. The silence on the other line was so beautiful.”
The late-night creep
As a teenager I was working part time at a convenience store. I was being trained by the late night cashier. This dude comes in and grabs a bunch of cans of vegetables and such, and comes to the counter and stacks the cans in a very specific way, in like a weird pyramid on the counter. The experienced cashier (my trainer) takes each can off the pyramid and rings it up, and when she reaches the end of the stack we realize that the weirdo has his cock out and has it lying on the counter behind the cans. Without saying a word, my trainer grabs a big heavy metal can of beans and slams it down as hard as she can on the guy’s dick. He screamed an incredible scream of searing pain, grabbed his cock, and ran out of the store. Then, she calmly turned to me and said, ‘you get all kinds on the late shift.'”
And this is why you don’t dine and dash…
“I used to work at Denny’s. I had two male customers that decided to dine and dash. Got their license plate number and reported it to the cops and jokingly mentioned that they didn’t even tip! Later that night they got pulled over for DUI. The cops recognized their license plate number from the report, brought them both back to the restaurant and forced them to pay the bill. After they were done paying, the cop just stood there and looked at them and said, ‘well?’ The two guys sheepishly handed me my tip.”
The impatient manager
“I worked at a restaurant that was very popular for brunch and Mother’s Day was probably our busiest day of the year. I had a customer call the evening before and ask for a table for six and he was incredibly rude when I informed him that this would simply be an impossibility. He kept getting more and more worked up, asking to speak to my manager. At first I didn’t want to pass the phone over (my manager wasn’t the nicest guy and we were in the middle of a busy dinner shift) but my manager came up behind me and demanded to know why I had been on the phone for so long. I was like “f_ck it, this customer isn’t going to listen to me anyways” and gave the phone to Mac. Mac asked how he could help, listened for about 15 seconds before telling this dude something like, ‘so you’re tying up my hostess in the middle of dinner even though she’s already told you nicely that we can’t fit you and your goddamn family in the night before our busiest day of the year? F_ck you, buddy!’ And hung up the phone.”