Unless this guy is a serial deadbeat w/ your restaurant, I would have had some compassion for a guy with no money trying to feed something to his family and just given him the fucking pizza and then move on with my life with the knowledge that I’m not always a complete piece of shit.
Nit to detract from the OPs rant, but his own cite says that restaurant tips are NOT part of the hold. My WAG is that the bank doesn’t credit money deposited via ATM until the next business day so there was no available money in the account.
<snerk>
“Meat’s meat, and a man’s gotta eat!”
And get fired for giving away free product?
I highly doubt the long-time manager of a pizza franchise would get fired for doing something charitable for somebody down on their luck. Or just cover the cost out of your own pocket? As long as it’s not somebody that’s showing up all the time w/ this problem, doing something kind is better than turning them away and then going online and spending hours complaining about it.
Lovin’ beats hatin’, as the clown says.
You know, I came to a conclusion awhile back and this thread reminds me of it:
It really isn’t about banking at all. Or the world, or any version of reality. All of those things are irrelevant.
The problem is that they’ve been taught a certain way of arguing to get what they want.
When they were a child, they learned that “I want candy!” is answered with “No” by default. So you follow up with “But I…” and provide an excuse. If the answer is still no, you try a different “But I…” and you keep trying until you finally get what you want.
They were never taught that any of this should make any sense, because it doesn’t really. When you’re three and you keep arguing, you don’t get the candy because you made a solid, rational, logical argument. You get the candy because your parents are so sick of you whining that they just want the noise to stop. And that’s the lesson you learn at a very young age: just keep making noise and eventually you get what you want.
Some people have simply never outgrown that. It really doesn’t matter how the bank operates. They don’t care. Do you really think they just deposited $20? Of course not! All of these things are just noise. Any coincidence between the noise and reality is pretty much just that - a coincidence - and they’ll keep making different noises until they get what they want. As noted in the OP, they don’t even care if their arguments make sense, or if they’re consistent. They just know that noise equals compliance.
And let’s be honest here: they do get what they want, at least often enough to convince them that they’re doing the right thing.
These people are just Skinner’s superstitious pigeons (linkin case you’re not familiar with the reference) pecking away at the little colored spot until they get what they want. For them, the world is just an abstract Skinner box.
I’d agree except for this customers’ bad manners. This would only encourage such behavior.
Especially if GrandWino is working that day.
If giving away a pizza that doesn’t belong to you is the only thing standing between you and always being a complete piece of shit, then you need to do a lot more rethinking of your life.
There are situations where I’ve given away pizza. Namely, situations where someone comes to the counter and says, “Man, I’m hungry, can I get a pizza?”
The situation in the OP is either a moron, or more likely, a scammer. Back in the 90s, we used to take checks, and we kept a list of people who bounced more than two. Some had bounced 10-20 before we got them on the “no checks” list. And they always had a story, “The money’s there, I swear it!” Leaving the pizza business has limited my exposure to those types, which has improved my faith in humanity.
Not sure if this is the same for debit cards, but with credit cards: The merchant has to pay a bigger fee for cards that were typed in, than for cards that were swiped. So maybe the manager has beat it into the heads of the cashiers that they aren’t supposed to be happy about manually typing in the card number.
Yes, the cash register or other POS equipment DOES record the source of the data (swiped or hand-typed); you can even see it noted on your copy of the receipt (often simply with the letter M for manual or S for swiped, somewhere), and this information is included in the data sent to the processor.
Cite: Personal experience, having designed a portion of the cash-register side of the interface.
OP, you sound overly butthurt about your job in dealing with other people. This is the same crap when listening to dept store workers complaining about customers. Why can’t workers just do their jobs instead of complaining about every little thing. As you are just now learning apparently, life is plumb full of screwed up people and if you continue to perform at a job in dealing with people, common sense should tell you it’s not ever going to change until you change your job to one where you don’t deal with the public so directly.
So yes, it is your problem because it’s a side effect of being a pizza delivery boy. It’s obvious you can’t handle it so why don’t you work in back and just make the pizza’s or something?
In all fairness, your name does tend to solicit inquiry. 
d&r
I bet the OP can PM you their address and you can send them some of your money.
Or the $20 was deposited with a teller instead of at the ATM, but it wasn’t $20 in cash; if it was a $20 check drawn on some other bank, the amount would be pending – but unavailable – until the funds can be verified, because, y’know, some checks bounce.
It’d also explain the OP’s lament: “the gentleman wants to tell us his life story, about how just before he came here to pay for his $19.70 worth of food, he definitely went to the bank to deposit a quick 20 dollars, so he definitely has 20 whole dollars in his bank account. Good job, genius. Why didn’t you bring us the twenty dollars, and skip the middleman?” If he never had 20 dollars, but just a check of dubious provenance…
Get off the internet and go do your math homework. I don’t care if it is Friday night and you’ve got a big Warcraft raid planned.
Or maybe it was the 5 dollar pack of smokes he picked up at the convenience store on the way to get the pizza.
Many years ago, I did some work on a large bank’s phone query system. This was when you actually got to speak to a human!.
The mod was to initiate billing for the call.
The original amount was to be $1.50/call, and it could either be charged or waived, depending on the rep’s assessment of the call.
I asked why they decided to ding their own customers.
“Because a large percent of the calls they were getting were from people who never balance a checkbook and have an average balance of $40”.
Pretty good reason!
These people were calling and asking their balances to see if they could get another $20 out of the ATM without getting hit with the $30 OD charge.
I understand it took two months for the geniuses to catch on…
And you sound like somebody who doesn’t have much understanding of the function of the BBQ Pit. Or was your insulting of the OP supposed to be a pitting? If so, I liked the OP better.