You should never be rude to anyway, especially people who work in of any public service. Mostly because you can never be too sure what people are going to do behind your back.
This rule applies even more so for people who are handling your food. One quick cheeky remark and in goes their spit in your mojito.
Find the original thread source at the end of the article.
More than a few decades ago I worked at Denny’s. I had two male customers that decided to dine and dash. I 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 ‘driving under the influence’, cops recognized license plate number from the report, brought them both back to the restaurant and forced them to pay the bill. After he was done paying, the cop just stood there and looked at them and said well?
The guy sheepishly handed me my tip.
Organic__wifi
I worked at a telecom in Canada (I am no longer an employee there, thank God).
This lady comes in with a broken iPhone and is demanding 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 is getting it for zero. She looks at me and goes I do not want a case, and AppleCare is a scam.
We work on commission, so this essentially meant I was getting nothing and ruining my numbers. She keeps telling me to hurry up through the setup and I was trying to get them out of the store with everything transferred over and set up. She grabs the phone and starts marching off saying I was a terrible employee. She gets three steps out of the store and drops the phone, gets a shattered screen and the white screen of death. She ran back in asking what I can do. I shrug and went ‘Sorry, but AppleCare sure would have helped, eh?’
thelostcanuck
As a teenager I was working part time at a convenience store. I was being trained by the late night cashier. This man 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, like a weird kind of pyramid on the counter.
As the experienced cashier (my trainer) takes each can off the pyramid and rings it up, she reaches the end of the stack and we realize that he has his penis out and has it laying on the counter behind the cans.
Without saying a word, the trainer grabs one of the big heavy metal cans of beans and slams it down as hard as she can on the guy’s junk. He screamed an incredible scream of searing pain, grabbed his cock, and ran out of the store.
She to me: (calmly) “You get all kinds on the late shift.”
faxinator
I was standing at the counter of the pizza place I work at. A lady storms in and slams a pizza down on the counter.
“This isn’t the freaking pizza I ordered, what the heck are you going to do about it?” She asked.
I look at the pizza then at my buddy Nick and turn back to her and said, “Nothing.”
She then goes on a long rant telling us that we are going to be fired and how uneducated and incompetent we were. She actually told me I must be a person with a mental disability, then proceeded to ask why the heck we weren’t going to do anything?
I said “because that pizza came from the pizza shop across the street.”
I think she actually managed to shrink in size and slink out looking so pathetic and beaten up I almost felt bad for laughing till tears dripped down my face as she slunk off.
necrohonkey
I worked at Best Buy 10 or so years ago and this happened on Black Friday.
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 female dog.
After yelling at everyone in my department about how she NEEDED the laptop that was on sale despite it being sold out, she proceeds 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.
mayonays
I was working the window at McDonalds on a late night shift. Some guy orders whatever and pulls up to the window. I’m cooking and handling the window, so I wasn’t there when the customer pulled up.
When I walked up to the window, I didn’t see him with trash in his lap. I open the window to take his card or cash and he throws a bag of trash at me. I take a step back, bothered that I just got trash thrown at me, and I watch his car speed off. I’m pissed, but there’s nothing I can do.
A couple seconds later I hear a small bang of metal on metal. I walk to the lobby and look out the windows. The douchebag 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 just happened inside.
RedditWhileWorking23
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.
We called the cops and the jerk got arrested and had to have his car towed.
gocubs44
A guy comes in to my place of employment and is being a complete jerk. He did not want to show identification to buy beer even though he looked 20 (at the oldest) and started constantly yelling and swearing at everyone. 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. The sheriff saw how the guy was acting and saw where he was parked. The sheriff went out, got his ticket book, and wrote the guy a ticket.
The jerk realized he wasn’t getting his beer and went outside…to find he was getting ticketed.
I could not stop laughing.
LadyVerene
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. He was incredibly rude when I informed him that this would simply be an impossible. He kept getting more and more worked up, asking me 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.
So I was like “screw it, this customer isn’t going to listen to me anyways” and gave the phone to him. My manager asked how he could help, listened for about 15 seconds before telling this guy 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? Screw your buddy!”
And hung up the phone.
hedgehoglady
I was working at Tim Hortons drive-thru and some jerk 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 real impatient and just really rude.
I just shook my head and so he got all pissed off and finally gets 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.
toastwizardd
I’m not sure if being a public defender counts as a retail or service worker, but considering that I provide criminal defense to indigent clients facing deprivation of their rights and freedom, I’ll consider it service nonetheless.
I was representing a scumbag client who was a massive drug user, who got high and beat the heck out of her 8-year-old daughter with a belt after she accidentally broke mommy’s pipe. She was charged with child cruelty and possession of drugs and given her criminal record, the district attorney’s plea offer was three years of prison. Needless to say, my client didn’t want to go to prison for “giving her daughter what she deserved” and started freaking out at me when I told her that’s the best offer I was going to get from the DA, and it was either accept that offer or go to trial. I further pointed out the mountain of evidence against her, primarily: the photographs of her daughter’s injuries, the bloody belt that was recovered from her bedroom, the broken pipe with drug residue in it, and the fact that her daughter was going to testify against her at trial.
After she was done cursing me out, calling me a “public pretender,” and every other derogatory name she could think of, she fired me and somehow managed to hire a private attorney for the low price of $8,000 (I still don’t know how she managed to come up with that, but I have plenty of reliable guesses).
The private attorney “guaranteed” her that he could win her case at trial, and that’s exactly what she chose to do.
Long story short, the private attorney clearly never even read this woman’s file before trial. The trial lasted roughly three hours, the jury was literally out for only five minutes, and the judge sentenced her to ten years of prison.
It was a good day.
WizardLawyer
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 looks back and says “Well why the heck can’t you order ones like this?! I’m sure you can find them online!!”
I clench my teeth and smile again, saying “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, making a horrible review of this place…she then got a nice big face-full of door.
It’s a push door and it was locked. She looks at me and screams “WHY THE HECK IS THIS LOCKED?!”
I said, “I have no idea.” Then her son looks at her and says “Mommy you were mean to that lady and I don’t wanna go till you say sorry.”
The. Best. Kid. Ever.
Abee34
I worked for an online banking help desk and this 18-year-old lad phoned up saying he had seen a transaction for 7 to ‘allpay.net.’ Because he didn’t recognize it, he decided the bank were robbing him of 7 and that I was in on it and I was a “thieving little prick.”
Then he gets his dad on the phone who stuck up for his jerk of a 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.
But 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 relaying back to this little jerk’s equally crappy father 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 and thanked me for looking into it and hung up.
kitjen