Content edited for clarity. We all know Karens and how crazy they can act. They have no filter, no boundaries, and definitely no care for anybody else around them. Here are some of the most entitled acts people have witnessed or had to experience at the hand of a Karen.
All That, For Sweeping
“One time my supervisor decided to sweep the café I work at. She was sweeping in the lobby but not under people’s feet/tables/chairs. Just sort of getting dirt and leaves people tracked in.
This Karen started yelling at her and berating her for sweeping during the day while customers are out because it was ‘rude and distasteful.’ My supervisor explained she was trying to keep the café looking neat and tidy and did not believe herself to be rude. Karen did not like this and asked to speak to the manager. My supervisor was technically the manager on duty that day and when she said this the woman refused to believe her. She grabbed her belongings and stormed out of the store, threatening to call corporate.
Fifteen minutes later, this woman must have still been seething about it because she called the store asking to speak to the real manager. My supervisor answered the phone and the woman went on and on about how a girl was pretending to be a manager and rudely sweeping the lobby. My supervisor told her off for her attitude and said she was not welcome back.”
It Doesn’t Work That Way Sweetheart
“I worked at a well-known local pet store in my town, we mainly dealt with aquatics. Had a girl, she was probably 18-20, call us and tell us that her 10-gallon fish tank she bought last month for her turtle had busted and she wanted to come in and replace it. My manager had answered the phone and told her that was fine, as long as she had a receipt or was in our system.
About 10 minutes later she showed up with a tank with the bottom busted out of it and immediately said, ‘Hi, I filled this up with water and tried to move it and it broke, I want a new one.’
I kind of gave her a blank stare and explained that’s why it broke because you picked it up with water in it. She said, ‘No, no, I filled it up with water in my bathtub and tried to pick it up to move it,’ (like the bathtub some reason made a difference).
I went into explaining on the piece of paper that comes attached to the glass on the tank explains you must level the tank before filling it up because even small tanks can weigh up to 80 lbs when full and obviously that’s going to because the glass to shatter with no support. She just said she didn’t know and I asked for a receipt.
She said she didn’t have it. That was fine, we kept all receipts under customer numbers for that reason. We tried four different phone numbers, no matches. I told her I couldn’t really do much without proof of purchase. She went into a long thing basically saying, ‘I bought this here, I used my dad’s credit card, he paid over the phone.’
I tried the phone numbers again, still couldn’t find anything. I told her all tanks of that brand had a warranty she could maybe try. She started cussing that it would take too long, to just throw the tank away and that she was going just going to release her turtle into a pond. I just shrugged.
Not even five minutes after her walking out, her father called my store, started yelling about how he was going to send us a bank statement and that should be enough to get a replacement. I tried to explain that unless it’s an itemized list, it’s not really going to help, and in between him yelling I also mention the warranty she could try. ‘Well, why didn’t you tell her that!?’ he yelled.
‘I did, she refused and left,’ I responded.
Of course, he asked to speak to my manager. After five minutes of hearing him yell at my manager on the phone, my manager just said, ‘We’ll give you a new tank, just stop yelling.’
We were told she would be back in 15 minutes so we set a tank behind the counter for her. She never even came to get the new tank, it sat behind our counter for three days with her name on it.”
They Always Find Something To Complain About
“I used to work retail, so I have come across my fair share of Karens. They were a huge reason why I went back to school and no longer work as a cashier.
Anyways, one day while I was manning the registers with a few other coworkers of mine, I had a massive nosebleed right as I was finishing a transaction. I grabbed a tissue and quickly excused myself to run to the restroom so I could try to get it to stop bleeding; this meant that I couldn’t say goodbye to Karen and give the little spiel about how I was oh so grateful for her shopping with us.
Anyways, after about 10 minutes, I was finally able to get my nose back under control and headed back to the registers. I saw her waiting to the side with a scowl on her face, arms crossed over her chest, the whole nine yards. She proceeded to scold me about how rude I was for not saying goodbye. After I apologized and explained that I had an unexpected nosebleed, she told me I should have tried holding it in and that the customer comes first. My brain was literally so confused after that.”
“Think Again Karen”
“I was working retail one afternoon and here came in a Karen with a return. At first glance it was no big deal, just coming in to return a shirt. She walked up to the register, handed me the receipt to start processing and we exchanged a pleasant greeting.
I took the shirt out of the bag to examine it and it was beyond disgusting. There were brown sweat stains all over it, from the pits to the stomach to the shoulder. It looked like whoever wore it rolled in mud or some nonsense.
I proceeded to tell Karen that I could not return the product because it had clearly been used, and that only unused and resellable items could be returned.
Karen threw a fit, started screaming at me, and accusing me of calling her a liar and whatnot. I held up the shirt and point to the brown pit stains and said, ‘Karen, can’t you see this stain?’
Oh, man did that make it worse. She continued making a huge scene and demanded to see the manager. News flash Karen, I am the manager and I was not budging. After 20 or so minutes of complaining, she finally left saying she would be complaining to corporate and getting me fired and blah blah blah.
Fast forward a few days. A guy walked into the store, found the first store associate he can, and immediately asked for me by name. Uh-oh, here we go again. Anyway, my associate brought the guy over to where I’m standing and I politely greeted him.
The guy spent the next 10 minutes apologizing for his crazy wife Karen verbally abusing my staff and me a few days prior. Apparently, the guy went to the beach and did some type of CrossFit / HIIT training class in the sand. Karen knew all of this; she was at the class with him! The guy ended up not liking the shirt for some reason and Karen thought she could pull a fast one on us by making a scene. Think again, Karen.”
This Claim Was Not Easy
“I have dealt with some fairly entitled people as a claims adjuster. I once had the misfortune of taking some high-end insured’s claim. When our richer insureds hit someone or get hit, they typically get a personal adjuster who does everything. However, they sent it off to me, something about vacations.
In any case, the best part about these claims is how easy they are. You basically say yes as long as it is not completely bonkers, and write checks later. So our insured hit this lady’s Ferrari. The claimant, Mrs. Ferrari lady, wants to take it to the Ferrari dealership. I said fine. She demanded a rental. I told her that was not a problem, take the Ferrari over there, we’ll get you another Ferrari, ‘not an f ing piece of shick Nissan Sentra like last time,’ as she said.
I called the dealership and explained to them how to proceed. I make sure to get her into a rental, made it nice and easy. I told them to send me the bill, and we would get it handled. At this point I was basically telling the Dealership to proceed forward as they see fit, to shoot first and ask questions later. The last thing I wanted was problems with one of these claims, and we had the power and authority to do so, our insureds paid out the butt for the extra service, even for their claimants. The guy on the phone told me he would make sure everything was good. I just gave this guy a golden ticket. He could hand her a 250 dollar a day car rental, and we would be writing the check no questions asked. It would go a little like this: start repairs ASAP, order the parts today, don’t bug me, send the bill. He got it. Life is supposed to be simple. I literally wanted him to email me the estimate, I send him the check and email him a screenshot. That’s it. This claim should be easy.
I got a call two hours later. The woman was ticked off. Maybe she got a dumb tech who didn’t hear the news. Nope. Even I couldn’t get that lucky.
She was out of her mind, so I talked to a rep that was capable of conversing without screaming like a banshee at everything. He explained she has refused to take a rental. I asked why. She wanted the same year and color and model. He told me he just spent thirty minutes calling any dealer in the city, knowing full well I would pay the markup for having the dealership rent a car from a competitor. There were no rental Ferraris in the area that matched that request, and none in the nearest three cities apparently. I asked our manager, my manager refused to ship in another Ferrari.
She went bonkers and nothing was accomplished. I couldn’t even get a word in. They took the phone conversation into the dealership service manager’s office. He asked her why she would not take the rental. After all, this should be easy. And she said this:
‘I need an exact year, make, and model of the rental car because I am going to the country club this Saturday and cannot, just, cannot let everybody know I was in an accident.’
I could not even process that. I was in such a state of shock I said nothing. The level of entitlement was so great I could not even process it. This woman was one of the ultra-rich. Even a Sentra would be perfectly serviceable for me. This woman was devastated by not having her life in perfect order. The delay was long enough that they thought I hung up the phone.”
Sounds Like A You Problem, Karen
“I was in tech support and this Karen called saying she had started a Powerpoint presentation, saved it, gave it a name, worked on it for eight hours, and then closed it. And when the program said ‘Do you want to save changes,’ she hit ‘No’. So the program did what it was told and dumped them, and ‘surprisingly’ when she reopened it, it was blank. I explained that she told it not to, but I was interrupted!
‘No, that is not acceptable. You will fix it,’ she said.
‘No, there is no -‘ I started to say as I was interrupted again! (we went around this circle several times)
I finally called the on-call support for her company and explained what was going on. Have you ever had someone roll their eyes so hard you could hear them over a phone? We then conferenced Karen, who started right in before either of us could say anything about how incompetent I was etc. He let her burble for a minute then cut her off. She started squawking and he cut her off again, and again, and again until she finally shut up out of sheer surprise, I think. Screeching like a harpy didn’t work? What world is this?
He explained to her the same thing that I had, and she started yowling again and he chopped her off.
‘No. You’ve wasted my time on my day off, working as a favor to people with actual problems, and you’ve wasted tech support’s time. You were abusive to both of us and I’m going to report you to HR in the morning. Goodbye.’ (click)
He hung up, and I was laughing my butt off as she spat and sputtered like an engine that just got a good solid swig of water.
In this particular version of Powerpoint from decades ago, early 1990s, while it did have autosave, the autosaves were both unreliable and automatically deleted when you closed the program. Microsoft wouldn’t support anything over 25 slides, and hers was over 250.”
Karens Will Stop At Nothing
“I used to work in a public night shift service, kind of like an emergency room but for non-emergencies, to keep the hospitals clear of white codes (so anything from a fever to a sore throat, to prescriptions for urgent treatments), and a Karen walked in at 3:00 am asking for a prescription for hypertension meds. This wasn’t unusual, as people (old people, more often than not, but she looked 55~) sometimes didn’t notice they’re running low.
Anyway, the law (not a rule, not my decision, the law) stated that this service can only write prescriptions for potentially life-threatening conditions’ medications for a maximum of 72 hours coverage (so if you take one pill a day, I can only prescribe you a single blister. Here we don’t have bottles, but blisters). While I was writing the prescription Karen casually mentioned that she was an insomniac, and while cleaning the medicine cabinet she realized she was down to her last full blister. My pen stopped, I asked her to repeat, ‘full blister?’ She confirmed, so I took the prescription, tore it in half, then again, then I threw it in the bin, explaining to her the law. She got mad, started yelling, and threatening to call the cops. I told her to go ahead. The cops came, and she triumphally announced that I was refusing to treat her. I explained the situation, and they asked her if it was true that she had a full pack, and she of course (being a Karen who is always right no matter what) confirmed it. The cops looked at her (still with a look of triumph, waiting for them to arrest me), then at me, then asked her politely to leave, as I was in the right. She was livid.
The day after my boss called me and cracked up because she went there during the day to talk to the manager, and she (my boss) told her the exact same thing. Never saw her again in there, weirdly enough.”
And Now Karens Can’t Do Math
“A woman came up to my register and asked for the price of a protein bar. Every item in the store had a physical price tag, because we didn’t have scanners at the register.
I took it from her, flipped it over, and let her know it was $2.49 before tax. She asked me how much the case would be. Normally we did discounts for cases, but they had to be ordered ahead of time, so I started explaining we couldn’t do a discount unless – she cut me off aggressively and hissed, ‘I didn’t ask for a discount.’
So I typed in $2.49 x 12, added tax, and told her the final price. She stared me down for a few minutes before asking me to get my manager. Once my manager arrived she spent literally 10 minutes tearing into me, describing me as the least helpful person ever, talking about my bad attitude, complaining about how awful and rude I was, etc.
I was working nearly full time (35.5 hours per week) and commuting to a school over an hour away four days a week. This lady took the time out of her day to break me down to the point I started crying. Thanks Karen, I still remember you – hope you enjoyed your freaking protein bar.”
She Flipped Her Lid
“I was working for a phone company in a call center. We were in training for a new scope of service, and part of that training involved listening to some of those calls that ‘may be recorded for training purposes.’ Normally, the recordings are selected semi-randomly, but this one was specifically selected because it had happened to a supervisor in our center ten minutes prior.
Karen called us in a fury. It seems that she had discovered that her son had replaced her number on his ‘five favorite numbers’ list with the contact information of an unknown female. She wanted us to change it back. We legally could not do that. It was not her phone, after all, and he made the change intentionally.
When the agent on the call told her this, Karen flipped her lid in the way only a true ‘Karen’ could. It was the full package: screaming, shouting, accusing us of being crooked, unfair, ‘the customer is always right, etc. At this point, I should mention that Karen was calling from the store in her local mall. After about five minutes of Karen Rage, we heard the following exchange:
A serious authoritative voice said, ‘Ma’am if you can’t calm down, you’re gonna have to leave the store.’
Mostly incoherent K-Raging (Karen raging) happened next and it sounded like she was saying something along the lines of, ‘I will not calm down!’, ‘they’re cheating me’, and so forth.
The voice said back, ‘Okay, ma’am? You’re under arrest.’
Shocked, disbelieving pause in K-Raging ensued with her saying, ‘I’m what?’
The authority said back, ‘You’re under arrest, ma’am, for [something muffled and unintelligible].’
This final declaration was followed by the sound of a mobile phone clattering to the floor/countertop, from where the salesperson retrieved it.
The salesperson stated, ‘Uh, yeah, sorry about that. I don’t think you have to worry about this anymore, she just got arrested.'”
Ogre Lady
“For my second-grade end-of-the-year school party, we went over to a community pool. It was designed for kids, with a lazy river, slide, etc. There were a few kids that had gotten hold of inner tubes, like the style you find at water parks all the time. I wanted one too and found one sitting on the edge of the pool. I grabbed it and started to play with it, as kids do. Some lady came over and told me that she had rented it and that I couldn’t play with it. Ogre lady took the tube and left it on the edge of the pool, not even using it, smirked back at me with this awful face as if she had beat me in some major contest of wills. Me, being raised to respect people that were (at least technically) adults, I said fine, whatever. Weird flex to prove your adulthood by bullying a seven-year-old but whatever, I moved on with my play. Some swim instructor that had another tube noticed and let me play with one that her class was done using. I said thank you, happy me had a tube now.
Another kid in my class immediately bobbed over and asked if he can use my newfound tube. I told him no, as I just got it. He shrugged and went over and took ogre lady’s tube, which she was not using and has left on the edge of the pool. I kept playing for probably another two minutes when ogre lady came splashing back. The conversation went like this:
Ogre lady said, ‘I told you to stop playing with that tube. Give it back.’
I responded with, ‘This isn’t your tube, that swim instructor gave it to me and another kid in my class took yours down the lazy-‘
Ogre lady interrupted and shouted, ‘I don’t believe you! Give it here!’
She proceeded to yank the tube off my head.
I yelled, ‘Hey!’
Ogre lady put the tube back on the edge of the pool right where the last one was and came over to me. She said, ‘You’re a little thief and your mother ought to be ashamed of raising a liar. If I see you going near that tube again, I’ll have you kicked out of the pool.’
She went back to gossiping with the other stereotypical suburban moms.
I obviously was terrified and felt awful because I got yelled at and insulted by a stranger. I don’t remember the rest of the day, other than it was pretty miserable after that. The injustice of the whole thing, especially that the other kid who took the tube got off with the whole thing (he often wasn’t very nice to me), still makes me grit my teeth. I am now a full-grown adult.”
Coupon Crazy
“When I was working retail, this one woman had a big bag of coupons. Most of them were unusable because either they were expired or they were duplicates. She berated me because the system was rejecting most of the coupons. She called me stupid amongst other names, telling me I just wasn’t doing it right. Then as a typical Karen would, she asked to speak with my manager.
My manager came and asked what the problem was. The women ranted about how incompetent I was because I didn’t know how to scan a coupon. My manager looked at the coupons and the coupons were the problem, not me. My manager told the customer off for being disrespectful to me and told the customer to leave the store.
I hated working there but I’m so grateful that I had managers that totally didn’t go by the ‘customer is always right’ rule and weren’t afraid to stand up for their employees. That was just one of many incidents.”
PETA Was Not On The Way
“In high school, I worked at a restaurant on the jersey shore. My manager who basically lived at the restaurant had a pet fish that she kept on the hostess desk. Trust me when I say this fish lived a very good life- she was obsessed and everyone knew not to mess with this fish.
One day during a Sunday brunch buffet a random woman there eating, out of nowhere, decided she was going to ‘save’ the fish. So she grabbed a spare kid’s plastic cup that we left by the drink area, ran up to the desk, and scooped the fish into the cup. Then instead of running out of the restaurant, she ran into the bathroom that happened to be located right across from the hostess desk. I was in pure shock, but my good friend who was working with me leaped over the desk like we were in a movie (we still laugh over this story with friends) and ran into the bathroom after her. We did not know if she was trying to flush the fish- which was everyone’s first assumption. The woman tried fighting my fellow hostess friend for the fish. Both physically and verbally for a few minutes. Eventually, my manager got involved and also had to verbally fight with this woman who was saying that she couldn’t believe the conditions this fish was living in, why would we have a fish in a restaurant, etc.
Let me repeat, this fish was all my manager had at this point, besides work. So the fish actually got its bowl cleaned very regularly and lived alone. My manager researched things all the time about it and I know it was more than fine so I still am confused why she was so concerned.
Eventually, the woman went back to eating at the buffet- yes apparently her plan was to keep the fish on her table, finish her meal, and then go ‘save’ him. Whatever the heck that meant. She continued making comments every time she passed, commented to other patrons about the ‘poor fish’, and glared at us for the remainder of her meal.
The most ironic part was that she did not gracefully scoop the fish into the cup so the fish ended up getting hurt. My manager was very distraught after this all happened and the fish was hurt as mentioned. The woman had an entire table full of people with her and had not been a problem before so she let her stay. I think her focus went to the fish and she just wanted this lady out of her face. I personally would have kicked her to the curb, and said so that day. We never saw the woman or her family again, and did not hear anything about the poor fish conditions from anyone- even though she swore PETA was on the way!”