I went to Subway for lunch yesterday and ordered the Mediterranean chicken wrap. The “sandwich artist” takes out a brownish-red tortilla. I explain to her that I want a plain flour tortilla, the white kind. She tells me this is all they have, “WHEAT, LOW-CARB.” I commented that the last time I ordered this it was made on a flour tortilla. Thinking it couldn’t have been too long ago, I asked when they stopped carrying flour tortillas. She looked at me and said, “We have NEVER carried flour tortillas, we have only ever carried wheat low-carb tortillas.”
No, no dear. You see saying you have never had flour tortillas is not the same thing as not currently having them. I could go to McDonald’s and order a McDLT, Arch Deluxe, and a cherry pie. Sure they aren’t on the menu now but that is not the same as having never been on the menu. Perhaps what you meant to say was, “In the three days that I have worked here, we have never had them.” Perhaps you could have lied to me and said, “People ordering wraps wanted a low-carb tortilla, so we stopped carrying flour ones about 2-3 months ago because they didn’t sell.”
Yes, I know this is a weak pitting. I know it is lame to pit the Subway girl for her use of semantics. It is a pet peeve of mine that retail and fast food workers think that if they don’t remember it happening it didn’t happen.
It’s not just fast food, either. I went to a bath-products store looking for a new bottle of my favorite-smelling shower gel, and the girl told me I must have the wrong store because they’ve never carried anything even close to that scent. I couldn’t seem to convince her otherwise, and I began to doubt my sanity.
A week later I waltzed back into the store with an empty bottle of my shower gel bearing the store label with the scent printed right on it! Ha! I had proof! It wasn’t the same girl, though, so my triumph was pretty much snuffed out right there. But at least the nice woman working there *that * day explained that it was discontinued but still available by special order. So, I guess I win anyway.
You want some poor prole making just above minimum wage to be conversant with the history of Subway menu offerings beyond the limited history of the time she’s worked there? I don’t recall a subway “sandwich artist” ever lasting more than year in my local Subways.
Feel free to lie to me! Tell me a month or so ago. I just have a hard time understanding why people choose to work at the fast food establishment that they themselves have never eaten at. You would think they would be even remotely familar with the menu from having once been a customer. Maybe they are trying to make themselves look more knowledgeable by claiming they know what has NEVER been on the menu. This has the opposite effect–it makes them look less knowledgeable.
About 6 or 7 years ago I purchased a JVC minidisk/CD player for my car. It was the greatest thing! It played minidisks or CD’s (frontloading, removable faceplate). I paid $$$ for it at Best Buy. I even paid for the extended Best Buy protection so I would be dealing with them instead of JVC. About 2 years later it started skipping. I called Best Buy and explained it all to them. I was told, “We have NEVER carried Minidisk players. EVER! I don’t know where you did buy it, but it certainly wasn’t from Best Buy.” I drove down with my warranty, receipt, and all the other original paperwork. They guy still wanted to argue about removing the stereo (which was installed at that very location). Finally, they removed it and sent it off to JVC for repair. It would take a week. I immediately went to Circuit City and got a Minidisk deck, 10-CD changer (installed in the trunk) and a bunch of other stuff. I no longer shop at Best Buy because they’ve never carried anything.
You should have explained to her that her story sounds ridiculous because the “low-carb” craze is only a few years old. Subway is 40 years old. Did she really mean that Subway somehow anticipated this trend by decades and introduced “low-carb wheat” tortillas just waiting to catch the wave when the trend hit?
I still remember, from many years ago, a girl at the music store telling me that certain (non-mainstream) pieces of sheet music were NEVER available, and NO, she would not look it up and see if it could be ordered, because they were NOT AVAILABLE. (She was quite contemptuous and adamant about it, even after my meek, “But the album says that it’s available from XYZ sheet music—couldn’t you just look it up?”)
So I wrote to the sheet music companies, asked them if the music was available, and lo and behold, a lot of it was! So I ordered it through them. Imagine the irony (and I’m not making this up), when I saw that same bitchy music store clerk at college—she walked into a class, during break, while I was playing some of the piano music that she had ADAMANTLY told me didn’t exist. Someone commented, “That’s nice music—where did you get it?” And I was able to explain what I went through to acquire it, while bitch music store clerk shot me an evil look.
I still think of that incident with satisfaction. Sometimes, they do get their comeuppance (though I doubt bitch store clerk was laying awake at night after that incident—still, she didn’t seem pleased).
I think the OP was annoyed that the employee stated something as fact that she really had no idea about and argued about it with him. Nothing’s worse than someone who has to be a clueless know-it-all. What she should have said was, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember when we had the flour tortilla and we don’t have one available right now, is there something else I can get for you?”
Maybe they’ve never eaten there because the food’s not that good. Or maybe they have, but at the time didn’t really pay attention to the wraps. Maybe they work there because they really need the job. People don’t always “choose” to work places, sometimes it’s all they can get.
Why not give her a presentation using Powerpoint showing the drastic increase in low-carb products recently. A few bar graphs showing the shift from low calorie diets to low-carb diets in recent years, both in numbers and percentage of people dieting. A nice summary of how demographics play a role in your decision to diet and the type of diet you pursue would also be helpful.
That or you can shut the fuck up and order something else if you don’t want “low-carb” wheat wraps.
Yea, there’s this big disconnect between a lot of the yuppified types and service industry employees. I cut people a lot of slack in these jobs.
I can with 99% certainty say that the OP has never worked behind a counter. People can be very unreasonable and petty and for some reason get very worked up over inconceivably weird reasons when dealing with service employees. Often these workers become the whipping boys for all that besets the High Falutin’ Non-Atkins Mediterraneaen Chicken Wrap Bourgeoisie.
I think we must shop at the same store! Only what I got was the chamomile mousse. Every couple of months, for a couple of years, until one day the store said, “Oh, we never had that. For that you have to go to [someplace else].” This is real good customer service, telling me to go somewhere else.
Instead I went back to the place in the store where it had been, moved a bunch of other cans of other kinds of mousse and actually found one container of what I wanted, lying on its side behind another brand. I carried it in triumph to the register where, of course, it did not scan, and the saleslady said, “Oh, this. Well, we never sold much of it.”
No, I guess not–not if you’re going to lay it on its side and put it behind other products, so that only a person who is obsessed enough to stand on the bottom shelf in order to rummage around on the top shelf will ever find it. And also, I guess never selling much of it is why there’s only one bottle left.
I think we must shop at the same store! Only what I got was the chamomile mousse. Every couple of months, for a couple of years, until one day the store said, “Oh, we never had that. For that you have to go to [someplace else].” This is real good customer service, telling me to go somewhere else.
Instead I went back to the place in the store where it had been, moved a bunch of other cans of other kinds of mousse and actually found one container of what I wanted, lying on its side behind another brand. I carried it in triumph to the register where, of course, it did not scan, and the saleslady said, “Oh, this. Well, we never sold much of it.”
No, I guess not–not if you’re going to lay it on its side and hide it behind other products, so that only a person who is obsessed enough to stand on the bottom shelf in order to rummage around on the top shelf will ever find it. And also, I guess never selling much of it is why there’s only one bottle left.
