Do tell!
Shortly after my BIL killed himself a clerk who overheard a friend and I talking made a very insensitive and inappropriate comment. I asked that we speak to their manager NOW and kindly informed him that if I need to call in an attorney I would. Clerk didn’t deny saying what they did and didn’t offer any apology so they were promoted to customer. But as God is my witness if I had had to force things through the courts I would have; the worst possible thing was said while the nerves were still raw and open and I would not have let it drop.
Horrible that you had to go through that, but I admire you for taking action instead of just letting it fester.
Thankfully, the story has a happy ending;
On her way home by Taxi, the driver also noticed her erratic behavior, and took her directly to the Emergency Dept. She was diagnosed as having a stroke, and thanks to the prompt actions of the taxi driver, she was able to make a full recovery!
I’m a manager. When I receive lousy service at a business that is not mine, I usually try to give the manager feedback on how to help the employee improve. More often I give feedback that the employee’s bad service was the direct result of bad policy or bad management, and I let the manager know in no uncertain terms that they are the ones who failed, not the employee.
That said, I fired someone once when a customer complained. The customer(s) were internal to the company, and no less than three groups of them, independent of each other, called emergency meetings with me to demand I fire someone on my team. For the first two, I asked them to give me another month to work on her, saying I wanted to demonstrate that we were serious about investing in our people. But when the third group arrived, I knew it was a lost cause.
All that said, lying, racism or harassment are immediate firing offenses.
Weeeelllllll the reverse, actually. I managed a string of internal machine shops for a company, and as such did a lot of ordering in bulk [you know how many pallets of 50 pound sacks of blast media 26 machine shops can go through in a month =) ] More than once I would walk into my home shop headed to my office to meet with a saleshuman from some supplier or another. Guarantee that if I got the “Hey honey, get me a coffee, light and sweet” <bonus negative points if they added ‘just like you’> they would be shown into the office to find me on the phone to their boss telling them to send me a real salesman as this yabbo was clearly not going to work out with me.
Final total over 4 years was 6 guys …
I try and treat every person in a service position with dignity and respect, I say please and thank you, and I ask rather than demand. I have done my share of customer service work, and I treat them like I would want to be treated.
As much as I hate that happening to you, I do love a good karmic smackdown story.
I think I may have gotten someone fired once, but I hope it was just a matter of my complaint being one too many.
I needed to return some stuff to a hardware store many years ago and the customer service desk only had one person at that particular location. Except that there was no one at the desk so I had about 5 minutes looking around to see if I could find someone. There was an extra employee at one of the registers just chatting up the customer and otherwise being totally oblivious to everything else. Eventually he paid and left and she returned to the service desk.
I complained to the manager but never made any demand that she be fired or even written up. I never saw her there again and for about a month following that someone always asked if I needed assistance as soon as I walked in the door.
I’ve never run sales, but if one of those guys worked for me, I would consider that a fantastic opportunity to teach them a lesson. I might send guys to you just for you to give them an ass-chewin’. I wouldn’t fire someone on first offense for that, but we would have one of those “What did you learn from this? What are you going to do differently?” conversations.
I’m not following. What would be the basis of a law suit?
I once asked a supermarket cashier to please let me bag the groceries so that they would be packed the way I like them to be. The next item to be rung up was a carton of eggs, which he SLAMMED down onto the counter. Of course most of them broke.
I wrote an email to the corporate office, including the cashier’s name and register number. Some days later I got a call from the store manager, practically stammering with anger at what his employee had done, apologizing profusely. “He is certainly not going to be working our register any more. Actually, he probably won’t be working in this store anymore.”
I was wondering myself, but figured maybe a key detail is missing.
nm
For some reason when someone consumes excessive amounts of alcohol they automatically think they will be able to get me fired. Hasn’t happened yet.
Over the years I’ve had a couple people, not realizing I was the owner, swear they were going to get me fired. From my safe position I then mocked and ridiculed them.
Finance guy at car dealer where I bought a new car was a jerk to me and my wife. Wrote a complaint letter to the dealer and they told me he no longer worked there. I was hoping they would give me some free stuff like oil changes but I was happy he got canned.
Long story. TLDR : I had an accountant fired.
When I was in Japan, one of my jobs was working for an import company that handled professional products. One of the products cost between $80,000 and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was in the late 90s. We paid via a letter of credit, when means that the bank actually paid us and we would pay the bank bank. Authorizing the bank payment was my responsibility. When we placed an order to the supplier, I would authorize the bank to pay.
The supplier got a new accountant who was overwhelmed and things had gotten out of control for her. She double billed the bank, which shouldn’t have been a problem because I hadn’t authorized payment, but the bank contacted us and another manager in my section very stupidly authorized the payment because he assumed I had inexplicably spaced out on a $200,000 purchase.
In the ensuring shit storm where we had to try to sort this out, I sent the document via fax to her boss. She took the fax out if his inbox before he arrived to work, which really pissed me off. Talking to the sales manager, she was screwing a lot of accounts.
I called up the CEO at home and told him that I didn’t want her touching my account. We were one of their largest customers and that was the last straw. I would have worked with her but when she tried to cover up the problem rather than come clean, it was it for me.
For the idiot manager, one of the reasons he was kept around was that he was good at handling the complexities of large shipments and calculating the unit cost of each product. It was a huge undertaking for large shipment, taking hours. I wrote a bunch of macros in Excel and allowed it to be done in minutes. He eventually let go. Of course, I did as well, but that’s another story.
A young lady who worked in another office complained about a high-profile client.
On Twitter.
She tagged the client in the tweet. :smack:
Client called Boss-Man, Boss-Man called the young lady into his office and she was escorted out of the building.
For me, I’ve worked in retail and the restaurant business, so someone would have to be pretty godawful in order for me to turn a hair.
The old fallback; emotional distress. Although the reality is actually more like “none”. It was more a clear sign that I wasn’t going to let it drop and at that time and place seemed more appropriate than telling him I was going to call the newspapers.
Frivolous it would have been but at the time I would have done it; I did two others you could call frivolous but I considered worthwhile - and still do for that matter. One was against a dentist who fraudulently billed for work that hadn’t been done and another against AOL for hiding the identity of someone who use his (my late BILs) name to send hate-letters to a couple people; we won both of those. And we’re talking beating AOL circa 1995 when things like that just didn’t happen. The guy I kept on retainer back then was good; damn good.
Bonus points if they claim to be close personal friends of the owner, who will undoubtedly take their complaint seriously. 
So, when I’m in Ligonier, PA I always stop for a beer at Joe’s Bar. It’s a filthy-dirty dive with broken bar stools, where nearly everyone smokes, and they have hundreds of taxidermied animals. It’s equal parts insane, weird, and creepy. I live an hour away, but we go there three or four times a year.
Now, Joe died many years ago. There is just one woman working there, and I’ve always assumed she is now the owner. People sometimes stop, wanting to bring their kids in to show them the animals (taxidermied, not drinking). Joe’s has been fined in the past due to kids on the premises and so the bartender is very strict.
Several times when I’ve been there, women (always women) ignore the hand lettered “MUST BE 21 TO ENTER” sign on the door and enter dragging their clutch of preschoolers. The bartender stops them in their tracks, and the women always say, “I’m a friend of Joe’s, I’m telling him how you treated me!!¡”.
Bartender always replies something along the lines of, “You’d better talk loud, Joe’s been dead longer than your kids have been alive, now get your fat ass outa here”.
Of course, the drinkers (me included) all cheer.