I pit people whom purposely direct their complaints

The BBQ Pit
1

First, what this rant is not.

This is not a rant about people complaining to an employee about their performance.

This is not a rant about people complaining to a supervisor about their subordinates’ performance.

This is not a rant about people that have a complaint, and wish to speak to a manager about it.

This is a rant about the people that, when they have a complaint, make sure to purposefully and intentionally direct it where it will be least effective.

I work as a cashier in a resteraunt, and every so often, I’ll get people complaining about various things as they pay. The quality of their server, the quality of the food, the pricing, the exact workings of our credit card machine or cash register, etc. Inevitably, when I offer to go get my manager (or the server in question), they decline, and then continue complaining. This utterly mystifies me. Not only that, I get people that seem to actually be intent on accomplishing something, rather than just venting (neither of which is appropriate). Why me? I’m the freaking cashier! I ring people up and make change! I barely get paid over minimum wage. Heck, the dishwashers probably have more ability to effect change than I do! Yet they continue to vent at me, oblivious to my offers to get someone that might actually have the power (if not the motivation) to take their complaints under consideration.

This makes no sense! It wastes my time, it wastes their time, it wastes all the time of the customers behind them, and it makes me unnecessarily defensive! Do these people go into schools, and complain to the janitors about their children’s grades? Do they go into video stores and tell the cashier that the studios ripped him or her off with such bad acting, and demand money back? How do their minds work?

Have any other Dopers experienced the phenomenon of customers aggressively directing complaints at employees that are, with absolute obviousness, powerless to change the situation?

2

Oh, have I! I used to get, “Why don’t you have more registers open? Why don’t you schedul more people? Why don’t you hire more people? Why don’t you offer to pay them more?”

Bite me. There are applications over at the desk-you’re welcome to take one home!

3

Yep.

I used to work in a Cala/Rapls/Kroger deli, and people would bitch at me all the time about how long the lines up front were (and I will freely admit they were very long).

All I could say was, “Hey, man, I gotta go shopping here when I’m off, you really think I dig this?”

4

So why are you telling us about it?

:slight_smile:

Regards,
Shodan

5

Well, those are people who are hacked off but don’t want to make a big deal out of it. Or don’t want to take the time to make a complaint but still want someone to know they’re annoyed. I know it’s annoying but when I worked retail, I always made sure to mention that stuff to my manager. And when I was a retail manager, I always appreciated feedback from my employees. They assume that you care about their experience (particularly if you open with something like “how as everything?”). You may not care but they don’t know that.

6

One small flaw in your plan, Guin. You’re inviting these dingleberries to become your fulltime cow-orkers.

7

Spoken like someone who has truly never worked in a video store.

8

You mean they’ll give you your money back if you say you hated the movie?

I gotta try that sometime.

9

Don’t waste your time. On South Park, Mel Gibson refused to refund money to kids who didn’t like that Jesus movie.

10

When I worked at McDonalds, I swear I waited on people who came into the restaurant with no intention of eating. They just wanted some defenseless person to dump on.

(I started to phrase that, “They wanted some defenseless peon to shit on” but that just did not sound right at all!)

11

No. It means people will try to get their money back because they didn’t like the movie. As if it’s the video clerk’s fault that the cinematography sucked.

Although, I once rented a movie called Mahler. It was long, so it was on 2 cassettes. Normally in that situation, the store would still charge for only 1 movie ($2.50). But the price for that particular one was $5.00. The owner tried to tell me that the movie really sucked, and tried to talk me out of renting it. I insisted that I watch it. So she reluctantly rented it to me.

Folks, if you are thinking of renting this piece of shit, let me save you the trouble by explaining the plot: A bunch of sucky-ass actors read from a sucky-ass script as directed by a sucky-ass director. For four excruciatingly painful hours. I have never in my life seen such an unwatchable waste of celluloid as this, and I’ve seen The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go. I’d rather get a root canal than watch that orgasm of stupid again.

And I said so to the owner of the store. She cheerfully refunded my money.