Customers abusing service people are bad enough, but it’s way worse when it’s co-workers being bitchy. I was getting coffee one morning, and it seemed like there were a batch of new people being trained. The guy who took my order was not bad for a newbie, but the guy pouring the coffee was excruciatingly slow. He had to look at the screen to decipher the sizes, take a long look at the cups to choose the right one, figure out how much cream and sugar the customers wanted, and then pour ever-so-carefully into the selected cup. He guy in front of me was getting irritated, and to top it off, the newbie was pouring him the wrong size.
At that point, newbie’s more experienced co-worker walks up behind him and says “You have to be faster! FASTER!” And as newbie is stammering something about how the screen is not showing what the size the customer says he ordered, she took the coffee pot from him, elbowed him out of the way and finished pouring. Then, she stepped back to let him get to my coffee, and watched him screw it up again; she waited until he was just about to hand it over before telling him it was wrong.
And as I’m leaving, I could hear another co-worker (probably a supervisor) say to him “This isn’t a hard job. You have to keep this line moving.” He mumbles something. She responds with “NO! That is unacceptable! I don’t want to hear that you’ll try! You either do it or I’m letting you go!”
Poor kid… getting reamed out in front of EVERYONE. On his first day. On the rest of the way to work, I just thought how damn lucky I am the last time I poured coffee for grumpy assholes in the morning was over five years ago.
Yes, this customer could very well be the head douche of the universe. Perhaps the waitress didn’t flirt with him, or didn’t flirt enough. I’ve certainly seen enough people get pissed that they weren’t treated as the King or Queen of the Universe while dining.
Or perhaps the server made it clear that s/he hates waiting tables, only went to take the order when s/he couldn’t put it off any longer, and didn’t bother to get the order while it was still fresh and hot, but let it cool on the counter. I’ve seen my share of servers who think that it’s OK to gossip with their friends first, and only then take an order, and gossip some more (letting their orders cool), drop the order off, and then go out back for another gossip session and a smoke. The server doesn’t check back, doesn’t offer refills, and drops the ticket off half an hour after the customer was finished. Doesn’t the diner have a right to get pissed off if s/he’s treated like that? Doesn’t s/he have the right to explain that s/he hasn’t forgotten the tip, but rather that the server didn’t earn a tip?
There’s a family restaurant belonging to a famous chain that’s less than half a block from my house. However, I won’t set foot in it. Partly because I think the food in that chain is mediocre at best, but mostly because the service is consistently slow and poor. I get great service elsewhere, but this particular restaurant must have a bad manager or something. I think that the only reason it stays in business is because it is very easy to get to from THE major highway, and it gets a lot of people who are just passing through, who have never been there before.
Me too. If only we had a Robot Santa in the year 2010!
Customers who are not satisfied with service provided should speak to the manager. If the manager doesn’t care, then a letter to head office might be called for, but leaving it on the back of a bill with a passive aggressive holier-than-thou attitude complete with an undertone of “I’m a cheap bastard who doesn’t like tipping, and here is exactly how I justify it” doesn’t make service any better for the future.
While no one is deserving of out-and-out abuse, not getting a tip, even getting a short note chastising a server for negligent service on top of not getting the tip, hardly qualifies as abuse.
And like you said, there certainly are more than a few shitty fucking servers out there in the world. And when I run into one, I’m certainly not above not tipping or leaving scant pocket change for a tip.
When I do encounter less-than-stellar (and I mean, with me, your CS skillz have to be markedly shitty for me to consider doing anything about it) service at a given restaurant, my response is twofold: leave either no tip or (more likely) a rather obnoxiously tiny tip (say, $0.15), then have a quick, quiet word with the manager on the way out the door. Because the first part is totally ineffective without also doing the second part.
If service is very bad and the server is rude, I tip my absolute minimum; 15%. I talk to the manager about the bad service or rudeness.
I really beleive that talking to the manager is the best way to improve the service next time. I believe in leaving a decent tip for workers that don’t make a decent wage without tips. That’s my style, and I wouldn’t allow a bad waitress to cramp my style.
I served my time in retail working in an independent bookstore, and we really didn’t have very many assholes. Most of our customers were nice and friendly and the sort of people who were devoted to supporting their local businesses instead of buying books from Amazon.
The worst customer I ever, ever witnessed, though, was one totally crazy woman who attacked my coworker. The woman had two small children with her; one was a boy who was playing with a small hard plastic truck.
Crazy Woman: Do you have [book]?
My coworker, after checking the system: No, it looks like we don’t have it in the store at the moment. Would you like me to order it?
Crazy Woman: Did you just call me a bitch?
My coworker: What? No!
Crazy Woman: YES YOU DID.
My coworker: I’m sorry, ma’am, but I did not!
This is actually the moment I walked into the store.
The woman then walked around the counter, and much to the total surprise of everyone, started totally whaling on my coworker with the toy truck.
This lasted about ten or fifteen shocked seconds. Then the woman grabbed her kids and hightailed it out of the store.
We called the police, but I don’t think they ever figured out who she was. It was insane.
This could’ve been the case. I wasn’t there to see it. But the note on the check didn’t say anything about cold food or the server gossiping with friends. Mostly the note just went on and on (on both sides of the check) about how personally slighted the customer felt, and just dripped with self-importance, and how the server showed a woeful lack of awe towards that grand and glorious personage, the all-powerful customer who held the restaurant’s very survival in his or her hands.
The note couldn’t have been snottier if the customer had blown his or her nose on it.
And I agree with what others have said that worthy complaints of this nature are best discussed with the manager, not left behind to be read after the customer has left. That seems like cowardice to me, justified complaints or not.
This thread is making me grateful that I’ve never worked in any job that involves dealing directly with the public.
I think that a really good window to a person’s true nature is to observe how they treat the server at a restaurant, or the guy behind the counter at McDonalds, or the cashier at a gas station.
your a tough crowd but i find this story mysterious and exciting,a neighbor has a friend whose cousin works for directv and he is really short,and anyways to make a long story short was captured,locked in a closet by an autistic kid who mistook him for a leprechaun,this is a true story but i know how you people are,your like a bag of donuts,don’t believe the truth especially if its mysterious and exciting.
I don’t have much service experience either (just answering calls from listeners during my radio show and a two-week stint in a bookstore). Nevertheless, if I do say so myself, I go out of my way to treat servers, cashiers, and operators with the utmost respect. Unless they really give me a reason not to–and I can’t remember the last time that has happened–it’s always “Sir” or “Ma’am” from me when I ask them for something.
Here’s what I don’t get: Even if one is a true sociopath who would sooner step on someone’s face as look at them, why be rude to perhaps the only people that can give you what you want? It seems counterproductive to me. This is especially true in call center situations. Bitching out the operator will not get the problem solved; if the operator has any leeway or discretion, I would think that being yelled at or abused would make that operator think twice about exercising it in favor of the abuser. The fact that psychopaths have learned that kindness goes a long way toward getting what you want (see Ted Bundy) makes me think that people who are rude to service workers are intellectually deficient as well as assholes.
When I was 17 I got a summer job at Subway. This was in the food court of a mall, which was just down the road from a fairly large office park, so we got a huge lunch rush. Apparently one of us made a guy a meatball sandwich at one point during the rush (hell if I remember who it was - we’d sometimes get a line stacked ten deep). Guy comes back a couple minutes later, walks right up to the register, and without saying anything throws a hastily-rewrapped sandwich at me, and then starts howling about how awful it was. My manager, of course, came out, listened to the man…and gave him a full refund, then told me to go wash the marinara sauce off my face and get back to work. I quit a couple days later.
The next summer I was working at a movie theater, and had a woman throw a bag of unbuttered popcorn at me because, and I quote, “It tastes like air!” At least this time the manager told her to get lost.
Ah yes, the defining characteristics of bags of donuts: hot, greasy, sugary, don’t believe urban legends.
I’n still trying to figure out how an autistic kid “captures” a DirecTV installer, let alone mistakes one for a leprechaun when they dress in blue shirts. No top hats or anything.
