Those of you who say, “Jeepers, how can you expect a poor little minimum wage worker to know such things?”, kind of missed the point. It’s not that she didn’t know, it’s that she LIED and pretended she did know. If you don’t know, then SAY SO for fuck’s sake.
Nope, it’s not just fast food, and it’s not just retail. And, astro, it’s not just minimum wage workers, either. These people all share the same damaged gene, the same mutation within the strings of A’s, T’s, & G’s. If I could only isolate it and test for it, I’d volunteer to cull them from the herd.
You will find it among six-figure salaried PhD’s at the same rate of occurrence as any burger flipper. While some people enjoy pulling inaccurate information out of their asses, only these unique individuals can stretch that inaccuracy into an unbounded, unconditional universal law without caveat or corollary.
What if you hadn’t found the one remaining can of mousse? Wouldn’t you have been happy that you knew where to go to find one?
I work at Blockbuster, and our store is smaller than the typical location, so we are often found lacking when people come in asking for something specific. When I tell people where to go to find the obscure foreign film, children’s movie from France or silver-screen classic they’re looking for, they’re noticeably more grateful than the customers who just get; “We don’t have that, I’m sorry.”
If I had to take a job in food service, I would never take a job at a restaurant I liked, because I know I will never be able to eat there again after working there for even a short time. Food service is completely different from dry-goods retail, where you get discounts on stuff you like and don’t have to make yourself.
The first rule of white flour tortillas is: don’t talk about white flour tortillas.
I have a job at Subway, as a “sandwich artist” :rolleyes: , despite me never having eaten there before I started work. Why?
a) The job is local, and they were the only employers located near to my flat which didn’t require reams of paper work just to apply for a weekend job.
b) The food is ridiculously overpriced. £2.89 for a 6 inch sandwich is daylight robbery, considering the abject lack of skill and time needed to make it.
c) The food tastes like absolute shit.
I’ve only been employed since before Christmas yet I’ve been working at my particluar store, and I’m the only native English (non-managerial) speaker (which makes for some amusing scenes with drunk Scots and foreign staff).
Yeah, but you have to balance that against the moron customers who will just keep asking questions even after you’ve said that you don’t know the answer. It may be easier to just make something up. Even if the customer then decides you’re full of it, they’ll at least stop asking questions.
Yeah, I see your point. I’m remembering my own pit thread about clients who keep asking questions that I don’t know the answer to, and how utterly livid other dopers got at the idea of my saying “I don’t know” to a client. Judging from how flummoxed people were getting in my thread, it would seem that to many people, “I don’t know” is tantamount to saying “Fuck you.”
Gee, in a Subway thread?
{useless trivia}
You may not be aware of it, but much of the NYC subway system was privately built. 3 companies later were bought out. Some stations still show the initials of various lines, known also by the companies that made them. The 3 companies? IRT (Interborough), IND (Independent) and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transport - AKA BMT…
{/useless trivia}
I prefer BLTs, anyway.
I frequently worry about the non-official status of oregano at Subway. Often (but not always) if you ask, they will sprinkle some oregano on your BMT. But you have to be in the know.
What can’t there be a small sign that says “Oregano On Request”? Why, oh why must I endure this gnawing fear that one day I will walk into a Subway and be told “We have never carried oregano. What’s that, some kind of olive?” :eek:
Hmmm… I’ve seen this before, in retail as described above and other places too; I used to work on a team carrying out stocktakes and audits in duty-free stores - one of the items on our checklist was to make sure we looked inside the safe for any high-value items such as high-end watches and jewellery that might be stored there. The conversation nearly always went like this:
Me: Could you open the safe for me please?
Store Manager: There’s nothing in the safe
Me: All the same, I need to check if there’s any stock in there
SM: I can tell you there isn’t
Me: Yeah, but I have to physically check - you know, sometimes there are high-value items in there for security, you know, watches and stuff…
SM: No, we keep all that stuff in the high-value cupboard under lock and key
Me: Would you just open the safe for me please, so I can tick this little box on my form?
SM: <sigh> Okay than, but I’m telling you, there are never any watches in the safe… <unlocks and opens safe, pulls out a tray of Cartier watches> …except these ones here.
I think the real point here is shitty customer service. The event taking place was a sandwich transaction, the history of the menu had no bearing. Thus, if some dildo of a customer insisted on asking when a product was discontinued, the “sandwich artist” should have simply said “gosh, I don’t know. If you’ll look at our current menu, I’ll be happy to make you the closest sandwich to the one you want.”
It saddens my heart to think how much drama is caused by nothing more than the daily collision of twits.
Really? You think the OP was being a dildo? If I frequent a place, and they stop doing something I like, I will sometimes nonchalantly inquire as to when or why they stopped doing it. Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable question. I’d like to think that if enough customers bothered to mention that they did notice when the place switched from aged cheddar to cheez whiz, or from gourmet coffee to Farmer Bros., that the management might consider changing back to the way things were.
I think you misunderstand the lifestyle of a fast food worker. It’s not like “Yes! I got a job at Taco Bell! Now it’ll be chalupas every day, Baby!” It’s more like “Yes! I got a job! Now I can pay rent! I can’t believe I have to squirt guacamole out of a caulking gun!”
Maybe she’s relatively new. After a month or so on the job you may think you have a better understanding of the job than you actually do. Maybe you are mixing up your fast food experiences and remembering something thats not there. Maybe just the single franchise near your house carried them because they were cheating and buying flour tortillas from Costco. Maybe you were always getting low carb tortillas and didn’t notice until they changed to brown ones. Maybe she’s from another store where they genuinely didn’t have flour tortillas, and they were just test marketing them where you are or something.
I went through something like this with my high school BF, Steve the Idiot.
The year was 1987 (this is relevant). Steve the Idiot asked what I wanted for my birthday. I asked if he could find me a copy of the album Beatles for Sale. My friend’s mom had a copy, and we’d been listening to it, but the mom wouldn’t let me borrow it to make a copy, and their stereo wasn’t set up to make cassette copies. The reason it was so precious to my friend’s mom, you see, was that it was an import: never released in the US, and back in 1965, she’d ordered it and waited months (I think) for it to be shipped from the UK.
I explained all this to StI. “It’s an import. It was never released in the US. You’d have to go to a used record store. It might cost a lot, so I’d understand if you can’t get it for me; you could get me The Joshua Tree instead.” He toddled off to Sam Goody’s, looked it up in the catalog, and came back to inform me, “There’s no such album…Are you sure you didn’t mean A Hard Day’s Night or Meet the Beatles?..Well, the girl told me she’d never heard of it…No, I looked it up in the catalog. It. Doesn’t. Exist.”
:mad: At which point, I really wanted to grab him and shake him and pound his dumb head against the wall while shouting, “It does too fucking exist! I told you it was an import!! You are not going to find it at Sam fucking Goody’s! Do you ever listen to me at all?!” But that would definitely have broken us up, and then I wouldn’t have had a date for the prom. Instead, I reintroduced the idea of a used record store, which to him meant the Salvation Army, and I ended up getting The Joshua Tree after all.
And we broke up at the end of the school year, and the year after that, Beatles for Sale was rereleased on CD. (BTW, this is the same guy who was convinced that there was no use investing in CDs because something called “laser rot” would cause them to deteriorate within five years.)
[Beatle-nerd]
The first four Beatles CDs, including Beatles for Sale, were released in February 1987; your story must take place in 1986.
[/Beatle-nerd]
The release date I found for Beatles for sale was July 27, 1987. The Joshua Tree was released in March 1987. So maybe the story took place in early 1987. Or maybe I just have the wrong release dates.
Well, I wait tables, and when presented with this situation, I’ll lie, too…in the other direction. Many a time have I made up an exact date when we “stopped having” something I know perfectly well we have never carried. You’d be truly amazed how often this situation arose at my old job.
Me: What would you like to drink?
Customer: I’ll have Raspberry tea.
Me: I’m sorry, we don’t have Raspberry tea, would you like sweet tea instead?
Customer: No no, I want that Raspberry tea. I’ve had it here before.
No, you haven’t. I have worked here since the very day we opened, and we do not now, nor have we ever, carried Raspberry tea. You are thinking of our pseudo-sister-restaurant in the next city, which, among other differences, is fast-food rather than full-service, and has a slightly different menu that includes Raspberry tea. I will, however, be unable to convince you of that, because you’ll either ignore everything I say, or else realize you’re wrong but continue to insist that you’re right in order to “save face”.
Me: Yeah, we stopped carrying it in April; our supplier raised the price of the flavored teas by like 50%. Sorry about that.
Customer: Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just have sweet tea.
It’s even more fun at my current restaurant. First of all, it’s a steakhouse, in a town with (counting them off the top of my head) at least fourteen of them. Second, we’re Texas Steakhouse, and there are a few Texas Roadhouses (an unrelated chain) in the surrounding area. People get the different menus confused. Generally, there’ll be something on our menu that corresponds to the other place’s items (the names of which I know fairly well from experience), and if so, I’ll give the customer the equivalent without comment; the most frequent, and simplest, case of this involves people ordering the “Bloomin’ Onion” as an appetizer. If not, though – for example, if somebody wants mashed potatoes as their side dish – then I settle in and prepare to lie.
Me: …and for your side dish?
Customer: Mashed Potatoes.
Me: I’m sorry, we don’t have mashed potatoes; our side dishes are [blah].
Customer: But I had mashed potatoes here last month.
Me: …yes, we changed our menu a couple weeks back. See, this [points to Marshall Dillon, a signature ribeye we’ve always had] is new, and we got rid of the mashed potatoes. Sorry about that.
Customer: Oh, that’s all right, I’ll have a baked potato.
I learned a long time ago that getting confrontational with the customers – whether I’m sure of my correctness or not – is simply never beneficial to anyone involved. The absolute best result you can hope for in a situation like that is that, after wasting ten minutes of each other’s time and getting both of you all pissed off, the customer is educated about one largely irrelevant fact about your restaurant. That anyone would engage in a customer/server debate in a situation where they’re actually wrong is just mind-boggling to me. I want to pay a visit to the clerks and servers in the above anecdotes, smack them in the head, and give them a little lesson about A) principles of service and B) prudent concession of irrelevant moral “victories” in the name of efficiency. Even if you think you’re right, you’re wrong. Deal.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing my part by telling bold-faced brazen lies to my customers as the need arises. And hey, no thanks necessary. It’s all part of the service. 
Hmm. That date for Beatles for Sale is wrong–the Beatles reissue program was timed so that they’d be up to Sgt Pepper in time for the “20 years ago today” anniversary of its American release on June 2, 1987 (my birthday, by the way, so that’s what I got that year!). But you’re right about The Joshua Tree. Which means that Beatles for Sale had been readily available on CD for a month before The Joshua Tree was even released.
Okay, so I was a little off. After further reflection, here’s what I remember happening.
—The Joshua Tree wasn’t released until the week after my birthday (March 9th; my birthday is March 2nd). Lucky it was so highly anticipated, or Steve the Idiot would have come back and told me that that didn’t exist! I had to wait the extra week, but he did give it to me. (On my actual birthday, he gave me a paperback copy of Return of the King. Because he’d heard it was the best of the trilogy. Never mind that I already had a hardback copy of the entire trilogy. Or that he’d earlier bought it for himself, despite never having read Fellowship, or even The Hobbit, and then left it unread for months.)
—Okay, so it wasn’t the following year, but later the same year, that the Beatles CDs were reissued. But I didn’t acquire a CD player until my 18th birthday, so I wouldn’t have been buying CDs until then. I was aware of the reissue at the time, but put it out of my mind until I could take advantage of it.
—While we’re at it, am I right about the reissues? ISTR that four CDs were released simultaneously: Beatles for Sale, With the Beatles, and the UK versions of Revolver and Rubber Soul. Correct?
Huh? March comes before June on my calendar.