Just ask me once, goddammit! (fast-food rant)

The BBQ Pit
61

I can see there are people out there who have never ordered, say, chili in Burger King or a chicken leg at Long John Silver, just out of, say, “absent-mindedness”. Once, the poor kid looked twice for the chili key, then called his manager over to show him how to key in chili. The manager was succinct: “Cut it out.”

I used to have the system beat at Chick-fil-a. My order was a 2-sandwich meal, double fries(instead of one fry and one cole slaw) and no pickles. The in-store code for this was, “Double Double Fry No Pick”. Then, I could order my meal using the code, and got my food, correctly, with a smile, usually. I suspect this is the reason behind numbered meals. This gives you the option of saying something quick and easy like, “#4, coke”.

I guess you have to make a value judgment such as this: “Do I want to bend the order taker to my will, or have my food correctly with a minimum of fuss and bullshit in a timely manner?” These people are not working at McD or BK because there were no vacancies for their masters-level education. Adapt and save it for when it really counts somewhere else.

62

Haven’t read the whole thread, but I just wanted to jump in to say, I’ve been having a similar problem at drugstores and variety stores.

Example: I had a supply of my favorite kind of mint, and when it ran out, I hied myself off to Sav-On, only to find that they no longer carried this mint.

Rilch, to clerk: Where are the [brand]?

Clerk: All the mints we have are over here.

R: [eyeing shelf] But you don’t have [brand]?

C: No, we don’t have them any more.

R: Great. [begins scanning shelf for something else she might like]

C: Yeah, we marked them down earlier this year and had them in baskets…

R: Great.

C: We just sold the last of them a few weeks ago…you missed them.

R: [continuing to peruse mints and gum] Great.

C: Yeah, I guess people didn’t like them…

R: [icily] I said: Great.

C: Well, if we don’t have them we don’t have them!

R: Well, that is why I’m trying to choose another product.

I get so fed up with that. I’ve worked in retail, and it became second nature with me, the instant I realized the product was not available, to suggest an alternative. If Product X was no longer in stock, I would point them to Products Y, Z and Q before their frustration could register.

Gah! I mean, I’m not demanding that stores stock exactly what I want; I just wish they’d stop doing the Clerk Shuffle and try to make a sale. I actually said, to a clerk at Target last weekend, “Either help me or go away.” She seemed convinced that I really wanted to know the location and style of each kind of holiday napkin, when in fact, all I wanted was plain paper napkins.

63

Rilchiam, what can they do? Maybe they aren’t familiar with the kind of mint they discontinued, and if someone is standing there, just saying, “great!” over and over, I’m going to assume you’re being an ass and taking your frustrations out on me.

64

Guin, when the clerk just tells me, over and over, that they don’t have Product X, that distracts me while I’m trying to make my choice from the products that are available. I’d already accepted that I couldn’t get X; I wasn’t blaming her for that.

“We marked them down earlier this year and had them in baskets…We just sold the last of them a few weeks ago and you missed them…I guess people didn’t like them…” What good was knowing that supposed to do for me? Again I say, when I worked retail, we were instructed to offer an alternative in the hope that the customer would buy something.

She might not have been familiar with the mints I’d come in looking for, but she could have said, “Altoids are very popular,” or something along those lines. Every time I looked at a package, she piped up again, but she had nothing to say about the product I was looking at; she just kept telling the sad story of how X was discontinued. I’d gotten it already, and I didn’t need to keep hearing it.

65

Well, she probably should have walked away, or something-maybe she thought you wanted extra help. I don’t know, I just ramble myself sometimes.

66

Considering your Bilge-Burger only costs around .99, perhaps you should hold off on the ‘special orders’.

67

God damn, where the hell do you people go to get this service? I’ve never, ever had a problem at any of the places I’ve been to. Well, I’ve also worked at TB and McD so perhaps my empathometer is high enough that I don’t notice what others call bad service. I do notice more than my fair share of Annoying Customers™, though.

I remember the Panasonic POS registers we used to have at the McD I worked at… ugh. I think they were made to be as absolutely difficult as possible to key stuff in on. Believe me, finding someone who could work those things quickly was a dream. I’d swear Panasonic did a special study on fucked up keypad entry. I’ve seen some of the more recent attempts and they are glorious.

But, even still, most registers require that items are entered in in a more or less specific manner, and when you take orders about once every minute and a half for over 8 hours you are bound to piss more than a few people off (like in back drive through). 1% of that means you are going to bother 3 people in a day on a busy Saturday (that’s my experience from people who take the time to complain, obviously the number of simply annoyed customers is higher). Sometimes a finger punches the wrong key, sometimes we forget an item because we were busy trying to concoct your special order on the keypad. And sometimes we simply forget to put something in the bag.

Consider each of your posts as a fast-food order, and the readers are the customers. How many times have you given them the wrong item out of your total posts? All the sentences you’ve spoken? Because that’s what a fast food order is: a statement with specific spelling and grammar when written (keyed in), but when spoken (dictated by the customer) can be in any arbitrary fucking order they “think” makes perfect sense.

IOW, go read Justhink’s posts. And you wonder why you complain about him. :wink:

Anyway… the McDonalds by me now has these cool electronic kiosks where you order your own food. And they’ve made it more or less quite simple, but you’ll see what I mean. You can only enter stuff in in one way. I use that thing all the time. I always wished our drive through was like that, where the customers had to enter their own orders in (of course, ostensibly so that we dumb teens couldn’t mess it up).

Sorry if I sound defensive, but when I was a manager at McD I took a lot of pride in my employees and fired ones that represented what is somehow the stereotypical fast food worker. To tell the truth I took more pride in that job than I have ever taken pride in anything else I’ve ever done. I finally quit because the owner wanted to transfer me to a different store. Fuck that.

So I went to college. :smiley:

Anyway. I’m not mad or anything, I just don’t get where the hell you people go to get food. In the five states and multiple cities I’ve lived in I have never had this kind of service. Eris’s honest truth, I actually suspect some of you are annoying fucking customers instead of dealing with stupid fucking cashiers.

68

Burger King has chili now.

69

The employees are just following the rules as to not lose their jobs. I have a job where a chunk of what I say is scripted. I will get fired for not saying certain things… I can understand it when people get frustrated, but taking it out on me won’t change a thing. Complain to management. (Please!) Eventually it’ll get through to them.

I don’t work fast food, but I can see the employee’s side of it because I have to say certain things to our customers, I have to do things in a particular order and following particular rules, and most people think they can just dump a bunch of information in my lap and then wash their hands of it. Not so.

70

What part of “I realize that’s not the order-taker’s fault” didn’t you understand?

71

“Take two the of the nuggets and throw them away. I only want a 4-nugget deal. I’m trying to watch my figure.”

(garbled response)

“Listen to me. Take two of the nuggets, and stick them IN YOUR ASS, and give me four Chicken McNuggets.”

“And can you take a cup and just go half Coke, half Diet Coke? I’m trying to watch my figure.”

“And I’ll have a Filet-o-Fish sandwich, because it’s FISH, so it’s less calories.”

:stuck_out_tongue:

/Tenacious D riff

72

Probably the part where you said

73

All right, I’ve had it with y’all. So all you smart-asses who are whining “they told me to say that”; kindly show us a copy of the “script” that REQUIRES you to ask the customer MULTIPLE TIMES if it’s for here or to-go and if they want chips and a drink with their order, or shut the fuck up, because you are obviously full of shit.

74

blowero, go screw yourself.
If this is the way you act towards service employees, I have no doubt that in the past you’ve gotten a little something extra in your food.

75

Those of you who are angry at having to repeat yourselves, think of it this way:

Imagine you deal with hundreds of customers a day, who all order variations on a standard theme. As your register is set up to take information in such a way, you can’t input everything they say at once. Is it best to try to keep everything mentally and never confirm, risking a wrong order when you confuse this guy’s “Coke” with the last guy’s “diet Coke”, or to ask the customer to say a few extra words with a negligable impact on their time and effort to confirm orders?

Is it surprising to think that if you ask a hundred people in a day the same question that you might accidentally repeat it on occasion? (I know I do this myself, in customer service.)

Be a little tolerant. Honestly, is that that big of a deal?

76

Is this something you condone?

77

Another poster out in left field.:rolleyes: Please find ANYWHERE where I said I have ever been rude toward an employee who is taking my order. Dumb fuck.

78

Someone must have been high, when you got your food, hey, blowero?

I am still laughing about that and guess it explains quite a lot about the fast fooderies near the chateau.

79

Blowero,

Sometimes people don’t have to actually say anything, they just give off an asshole vibe. I’ve caught myself doing it occasionally and felt much guilt and shame afterwards (if you step out of your own little world for all of two seconds and pay attention to how others are reacting to you, it’s not hard to tell) and have apologized.

Your condesending statements of “aww, your poor widdle brain…” ect. ect. pretty much sum up your overall attitude towards service employees.

I’m just going off of this thread, I don’t know how you are personally, but if that’s the attitude you give off towards service employees, don’t expect too much in return.

80

No, I do NOT condone it. However, I do not condone people who think they’re above service industry employees.