“Hey, nice little business! Not too big or obviously successful, or all that in-your-face stuff. Got a sort of 1950s small-town wholesomeness. I like it. Did you start it yourself?”
I swear 99% of my salary is justified just by “being able to figure out what is it the customer wants, needs, and what will get in the way of his doing business.” Amazing how many people get stuck on “I need to have green letters on a black background because that’s what the procedure says!” when the program is being changed and therefore so will the procedure.
I hate people like that chick with the 5 cheques, who think they can just breeze to the front of the line. A while back I was in a supermarket buying a DIY closet when one of those came by saying “you guys don’t mind, right? I only have one thing!”, rammed her elbows into the three people in line to make way for her and plonked her one thing on the conveyor desk. I turned her 'round so I could take her item and hand her to her saying “I have one thing only, too. So does he (pointing to the guy behind me) and he (third in line).”
She stared at my box. I said “it’s one thing. Big, but one. Now, back of the line.” The two guys grinned and moved out of the way to ease her way to the back of the line.
Mom’s said for many years that one advantage of getting old is that you can afford to be impolite. At times like those, I relish my ancianity 
So would it piss off the pizza guy if I ordered a pie and specified that it must be sliced into seven pieces, no more, no less?
I’d rather eat Rush Limbaugh’s dirty socks.
What do they do there? Hack at it with a rusty spoon?
Would it piss you off if you got the pie with one slice missing? 
This is what I was thinking also. That is, that if he’d tried answering it with something like “it will feed X people” that, NOT really knowing her real reason, she’d have bitten his head off again.
“I DIDN’T ASK you TO TELL ME HOW MANY PEOPLE IT FED…” etc.
I am bewildered that expecting a pizza employee to know how many slices they usually cut their pizza into is unreasonable, and even more so that expecting him to know how many people a pizza feeds is not. The former should be standard for that particular establishment, while the latter is the one with 18 million variables, which to me requires far more mind-reading than knowing how they themselves do things.
I’m also confused that people find it “stupid” to order a certain number of slices when feeding a crowd. My place of work does it all the time and it works out beautifully. (Though the place we usually order from actually prints the number of slices on the menu - I guess it must not be all that uncommon for people to want to know that) When ordering for a large crowd there are usually other things being served too, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong, when providing free food for people, to determine that each serving will consist of, say, 2 pieces of pizza, 6 wings, a scoop of salad, a slice of cake, and a can of pop. Obviously some might not want that much, and some might want more, but it has always balanced out well for us and if people don’t like it, well I guess they can get their free food elsewhere. I am very surprised to learn that giving employees free food makes me a stupid boss whose business is doomed to failure.
I do it other places, too. If we’re doing a bbq and I’m buying boxes of premade patties, I actually expect to know how many patties are in each box, not some general “Well, this box will feed 12 four year olds, or 6 middle aged men, or 300 supermodels, unless you are also giving them coleslaw or potato chips, in which case you’ll need to divide the number by the time of day you’re serving it and whether they had a big breakfast or not”. Just tell me how many patties are in there, and let me decide how many I will give each guest. Is that weird too?
I don’t believe that people are saying that just that stance IS unreasonable. What we’re saying is unreasonable is behaviour such as in SHAKES specific example, wherein he WAS a teenager at the time, and the customer in question did not allow him to even try to find out before she was unreasonably biting his head off. What’s unreasonable is not so much in expecting a pizza employee to know pizza information, but in being unable (as an adult, as opposed to a likely teen-aged fast food worker) in expressing one’s request so that one can obtain the information one wants. Rather than, as has been noted above, falling into a ridiculous “Alice and the White Rabbit” conversation.
This may be true, and the chain’s CEOs, managers and such may or may not have an SOP on the appropriate number of slices for XYZ Pizza chain. Minimum wage slaves (with the 2000% turnover that sort of job garners) may or may not know what that is.
Again, WHY is it so hard for a person to get an “I don’t know” from someone, regroup, and eplain what they really want?
I don’t remember anyone saying that it was “stupid”, just unusual as opposed to the more common question of “how many people will X type of dish serve?”
Huh? Where did ANYONE say that it was stupid for you to provide a free lunch to your employees, that it made you stupid, or that your business was doomed to failure because of it? Methinks, you’re either the lady that bit SHAKES head off all those years ago, or you’re reading a lot more into this than is there, and taking it personally to boot.
The difference is, you unlike the woman we’re all talking about in SHAKES example, likely DO communicate to your vendors in a reasonably intelligent manner. We’re not talking about what or how people order food, we’re talking about folks who refuse to communicate, but instead make everything a big guessing game for the vendor.
Well, here:
I actually have no idea what SHAKES means by that so I probably misinterpreted and got a bit hyperbolic. I’m sorry.
You’re right – I really am overreacting. I actually don’t have a lot emotionally invested in the issue of pizza slice size and quantity and I’m not sure why I’ve been so adamant. I fully agree with you and the others that communicating your needs clearly is a very good thing and that rudeness never is. I’ve just been surprised by the stance that it’s less common or even stupid to expect the guys who cut the pizza to know the SOP for doing so (if not the company’s official guidelines, I would at least think that they themselves would know what they do hundreds of times a week) than to expect them to be able to provide personalized advice on how much you should order, but on that I am content to agree to disagree.
I will, however, fight to the death on the issue of anchovies vs pineapple, and the appropriateness of various other toppings.
And if you’re always ordering from the same place and they cut their pizza with the same relative size pieces every time, then you’re not being stupid at all. You’ve figured out a way for it to work and it works. What’s “stupid” is assuming that walking into a new place for the first time, you’ll get anything close to useful information with JUST the question “How many slices on the Extra Large?” And I already said why: the number of the pieces has nothing to do with the area (or volume) of the pizza.
Say you’ve been buying from Pizza Pedro’s, and you know their pies are sliced in the more-or-less standard 12 for an 18". So you’ve been buying two pizzas, along with some wings and drinks and chips for your staff of 12, and everyone’s happy. Great! So now Pizza Pedro’s has an unfortunate grease trap fire, and you send your assistant to SHAKES PIZZA AND BLOW instead. She asks him how many slices in the 18", and he says 25 - 'cause his pies are sliced in squares - four horizontal cuts and four perpendicular vertical cuts. Does this mean your assistant only needs one 18" SHAKES pizza for your party? Of course not.
This must be a regional thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if here we’re more flexible about how our pizzas are cut. I guess triangles are more the norm, and more standardized, elsewhere. Here, almost every menu has “Feeds 2-3” or “Feeds 5-6” printed under the size in inches. No one cares how many slices it’s cut into.
