To hate customers

[rahjama]

Somewhat lighthearted.

Working in hospitality/retail, what things do customers do that really, really annoy you when you're working? I'll start

• Booking for 6 people and then saying "Hope it's okay we're now a party of 194"

• Paying in cash but they're 1-20p short. "Can you cover it?" No I cannot

• Sitting on tables that are dirty/unset/in the process of being cleaned when there are clean and set tables literally next to them. Then complaining about the lack of cutlery.

• Buying the cheapest pint, saying it's flat/doesn't taste right, then swapping for the most expensive pint.

• Picking up an allergen menu and then saying "is this all you do?" No that's all we do GLUTEN FREE it says at the top!!!!!!!!!

I would accept the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas in any retail (supermarket, retail, hospitality, etc) as enough to make most people understand. Oh and of course boxing day, help them really understand why these places don't need to be open on this day.

Similarly on buses, ooh I have to pay a fare... scrabble scrabble.

And in shops, it's especially irritating when they have had plenty of time to locate a card or cash, in a queue, but start scrabbling only after the goods have been put through the till.

All done electronically in our surgery - never see a prescription as theyre sent straight to the nominated pharmacy.

Saw something similar in a job I had doing training on computer courses, years ago. If there was an issue with a pc, we would turn it off, and remove the chair from that particular desk, until such time as we could get the issue sorted.
First person in, of every group always always always would head straight for the unwelcoming looking desk with a dead pc and no chair. Why!

I also created a barrier with chairs one time in a huge room, to make sure people avoided an area where there was a loose carpet tile, as they walked to where the toilets were.
They practically fell over the chairs instead despite the wide open space where they could easily have walked...

Oh god. Seems like the simplest way is sometimes the best

Ex supermarket worker here, and I always appreciated little jokes like that even if I heard it five times that day. A bit of brevity and chat went a long way towards making the day more tolerable! Those customers I always appreciated, it was a nice salve after dealing with the rude ones.

Love these. Worked in Customer service for years!

Favourite were people assuming that you knew automatically that they were English. When they hadn't even so much as said morning or hello!

Others who questioned why there were so many nationalities working at a tourist attraction?! We're a diverse workplace and it's great having them here to help communicate with our visitor's 🤦

People who hang around to the last minute then say. Ooh are we the last ones🙃

I could go on lol

Lots of people drink coffee before the meal, lots more order one to come after the meal.

Your preferences are not everybody's preferences......Is it so hard for you to specify what you want rather than whinge that the waiter/waitress didn't read your mind?

Yeah, if I order a hot drink and a meal in a cafe I would expect and want the drink to arrive ASAP and the food later rather than the drink be delayed to come with the food. You can just leave the drink there or sip it if you want to consume both simultaneously. Can't see why it'd be important for a coffee to be piping hot while you're eating tbh.

Amazing thread! Very funny to read; not so much if you're one of the abused workers posting.

I was talking to an ex holiday rep once and she is convinced that some people only go away on holiday in order to moan.
Someone behind me in a short line for some orange juice on holiday started moaning that she had to queue , it took all of two minutes to get her drink and the machines did work fairly well. Some people are just hard to please :(

My FIL used to work with a man who deliberately did just that. He invested in a video camera, long before most people had them (and long, long before smartphones) for this specific purpose. He and his wife would book lovely holidays and enjoy them very much, but determined from the moment of booking that he would make sure to find/invent/grossly exaggerate something to cause a big scene about and end up demanding - and getting - a full refund for their 'ruined' holiday. Disgusting.

Another of my FIL's colleagues (must have been something about the place he worked!) lived with his DW in a council house (pre-central heating days). He was so mean that he refused to buy proper firewood and, instead, he actually took up the floorboards upstairs and burnt them - a couple at a time (presumably spacing out the ones he used at first so they could work around the gaps) until, before long, they were ALL gone!! After that, with the upstairs now unusable, he started on the now-redundant stairs and then started eyeing up some of the internal walls.

He went to the council to inform them of the situation and was furious with them for expecting them to live somewhere dangerous and uninhabitable and for their audacity in taking rent for a whole house, of which only the downstairs could be used. He demanded loads of their back-rent be refunded, plus hefty compensation for their inconvenience and restricted use of the house - oh, and a replacement council house for them to move to that was intact and not dangerous!

Thankfully, the council just laughed right in his face, before beginning a prosecution against him for criminal damage of their property!

....I forgot to mention: he also took a saw to the now exposed upstairs rafters and beams, meaning that the house wasn't just in need of significant renovation, but actually in danger of collapsing and eventually had to be condemned.

The idea of the drinks being delivered first in a restaurant ( especially a chain one) is sneaky , they know that people will drink and talk , so by the time the food turns up they may want another drink as it's all gone.
Places that do free refills are good , not so good if it's not this option and you end up paying two pounds for a soft drink or whatever.
They also push for people to have a large drink too ' can I make that a large drink for you ' and hope they don't realize it's more expensive.
It's all mind games and 'up selling ' and positively encouraged by the bosses to do it.

Restaurants also take the menus away too so you can't add up the bill as you go along either I know it's how it is , but I'd rather keep one menu back , but I don't like to ask !
Not their fault I know

I try so hard to NEVER do this but actually have had staff on several occasions tell me to leave it as it's their job. Breaks my brain!

@Menopants that video is absolutely brilliant!

You were trying to save someone's life and he wanted more coffee ... that wins the thread.

They want you to drink your first drink then order another with your meal. I believe (happy to be corrected) there's often more profit in drinks than the meal itself.

It absolutely is no justification for abuse of the people working there, but I'm not in the least surprised that betting shops attract more than their fair share of grief from customers.

People who use them must be very disproportionately made up of desperate and vulnerable people with serious problems in their lives. The fixed-odds betting terminals especially, where you can lose £100 every few seconds: I think I could probably have a reasonable guess as to how many of the people who use them are sound-minded wealthy folk who enjoy a thrilling flutter with money they can easily afford to lose, as opposed to people who are low-paid and/or on benefits, maybe with other addictions alongside, who see no other way forward than to win themselves out of their poverty/misery/multiple issues.

It's all mind games and 'up selling ' and positively encouraged by the bosses to do it.

Yes, there's a whole side-industry based around using psychology and persuasion to increase sales.

Plenty of places deliberately offer a cheap option that they hope not to sell many of - its role is not to be sold, but to lure people in to the premises on the promise of its low price and then look pathetic and unappetising (and often suspiciously sold out) in comparison to significantly dearer options.

Some places even do it the other way, too, by having cheap and expensive options available that they don't really plan to sell many of, but whose main job is to steer people into making the middle-priced choice, thinking that they've actually been smart and made a wise, conscious decision compared to the 'saving' they've made by rejecting the top-priced option. 'Goldilocks pricing', I think it's referred to as.

I wonder if this is the thinking behind restaurants and their wine lists, on which they can make a big majority of their profit: the 'house' wine is perceived as a bit rubbish and boring and makes you look tight, everybody can have an 'as if' laugh about going for the £200 bottle at the top, but it does have the effect of making the £35 bottle look an absolute bargain in comparison.

Some 30 years ago I did the "dirty table" experiment for an afternoon. There were 6 tables in the window. I deliberately left one dirty to see what happened. It was like an absolute magnet. One bloke walked out because I had the audacity to ask him to sit at a clean table.

Mind yiu, after working there for several years during my student days and given that it was a railway station caff, no shits were given on my part.

Worked in a coffee shop, and an alarming amount of people would yawn in your face first thing in the morning.
Also, people who would get cross with you because you wouldn't let them in before opening, or after closing to 'just get a cup of coffee' or 'just use the toilet'.

I used to work in a pharmacy.
The answer to “what’s your name?” was often “aspirin.”
”OK but what’s your name please?” led to “the doctor was sending it over” and “sure, who is it for?” seemed to get an answer along the lines of “I phoned them last week”
Those were long days!

squashyhat
Question for cafe staff. Why when I order a hot drink and a meal does the drink always come ages before the food so it's getting cold by the time I can eat? Why should I have to specify that they come together? Surely it's obvious?

The drink is quicker to make, the tickets are made in order and so the drink is obviously made quicker than the meal. Also, I know this isn't cafe related but where I work we offer a hot drink and dessert meal but the tickets go to different places (dessert to the kitchen and hot drink to the bar) which means that the drink will usually arrive before the dessert does and they will arrive at exactly the same time because we have to go from one end of the restaurant to the other to collect either one.

*deal not meal

I know that many customers are truly awful and the stories on here are really bad, but people also have to remember that sometimes people have hearing issues or may have early stage Alzheimer's or dementia or just can't deal with questions! I know it's frustrating, but one of my siblings had a hearing aid and he has trouble understanding people , in a busy shop or a pub or somewhere it's even worse for him too.
I try to be on the ball when I'm out and not hold things up, but occasionally it happens.
I'm not excusing awful behavior or aggression or being rude, but some customers may need a bit of time too. We do lose a bit of capacity as we age and things can get overwhelming too especially if you can't understand something.