You have way more chances to get back at shitty customers doing food service.
Get a cunty customer and you just smile a little too large, be a little too eager to fix their issue and let your eyes glint just a little. Then fix their issue exactly what they asked for with nothing wrong with it and untampered with. When you return to the table put a little too much emphasis on “Enjoy” when you give it to them.
They will spend the entire meal trying to figure out what you did or call the manager over and make a big scene about how you did something but cant point out what. Ruin my night, I’ll ruin yours.
Right so in the jumpscare genre you use psychological trick, and in the psych horror genre you use jumpscares on shoplifters and bad customers who can wait an extra minute for their help.
You don’t have to jump out on them, though. One time I had this guy SCREAMING about his order when there was a huge line and he was like #3, yeah? Well he was there for about an hour and while he was ranting at 300Db about how I never do my job yards yadda I had a colleague go get his fridge. He was waiting for that hour impatiently and I kept reassuring my team this would be worth the wait.
Anyhow he goes and gets someone to fetch their supervisor so I walk up once I’d been called.
WHERE IS MY ORDER IVE BEEN HERE FOR 2 HOURS‽‽
sir by my account, you’ve been leaning on it for the last 45 minutes. Your order is already completed in the system and the invoice is printed and on top of the box, do you need help loading it or finding anything else today?
He just screams like Tarzan and starts to push it outside. 5 minutes later quietly shows back up in my now-much-shorter line and sheepishly asks for help loading it.
TLDR: I also like to play ‘ruin my night, I ruin yours.’
I heard some pretty stupid shit working retail.
“Where can I find the crunchy ice cream?”
“Uh… Like, the Nestle Crunch bar ice creams?”
“No, it was just plain vanilla ice cream. But crunchy.”
“Do you guys have any sour cream that isn’t refrigerated?”
“If this is only 2% milk, what is the other 98%?”
Looking at a collection of LOTR books shortly after the first Peter Jackson film released
“Wow! How do they already have 3 books of just 1 movie?”
Lemme at the guy about the milk, lemme at him, I wanna explain some shit to that guy, hey guy how much fuckin time you got pal, I wanna tell you about how cows work
I wanna know how cows work
The 2% refers to the amount of fat in the milk. Whole milk is usually something like 3-4%. So 2% milk actually is the “other 98% of the milk” since they skimmed half the fat off. Milkfat is actually not bad for you either*, vitamin d is fat-soluble and taking the extra milkfat out can make it harder for you body to absorb it.
Fat is also flavor, and when it comes to something like yogurt you have to put something else in so it won’t taste like shit. That something is usually sugar. For the same flavor yogurt its usually at least double the amount in the fat free variety. And it still tastes like shit if you ask me.
*the dose is the poison, if you eat nothing but cheese you will die of congestive heart failure
IME customers fucking hate it when you infodump on them when they ask questions like this
No, I know how milk works, I wanna know how cows work
Oh, cows are quite simple. They eat silage and turn it into milk, beef, methane, and more cows. Male cows don’t produce milk. Steers turn all the silage they eat into beef. Bulls turn 1% of what they eat into cum and the rest is used to produce pure, unadulterated rage.
Aw yeah, that’s the stuff
If this is only 2% milk, what is the other 98%?
Reminds me of 10% free
“Do you guys have any sour cream that isn’t refrigerated?”
How is that a stupid question?
https://www.finefoodgroup.com/tool/en/products/cheese-and-sour-cream/che/sour-cream-uht/cd04a
Because unless it’s a powdered mix thing, sour cream (and almost all dairy) in the US is refrigerated for food safety. They were not looking for a powder or mix.
It’s just UHT. UHT dairy is very much legal in the US. And does not have to be refrigerated. It often is, because unrefrigerated milk makes US consumers uneasy. But it doesn’t have to be.
I am aware that it’s less common than it is in Europe. But it’s not an unreasonable question.
Every question is unreasonable if you hate people.
Can confirm, also partially explains my taste in art
special case, Walmart is Cronenberg levels of body horror.
keep in mind, it gets worse the darker it is outside.
I’ve done both, and I’d say food service is generally worse. Neither are as bad as being on an assembly line, I can tell you that much.
Now that is shocking to hear. You do not have to deal with the whims of the general public. One would imagine anything would be better.
You still gotta deal with the most absolutely bored co-workers who are so disillusioned they create petty drama to fill their days. The 60 year old lady with a mullet who has been working the job outta high school is going to set an absolutely unmatchable pace for zero reason other than to give their ego a pat on the back, and not give two shits for the problems that pace might create when the shit they send down the line starts to inevitably back up.
All while doing absolutely back breaking and fatigue inducing actions for long periods while operating machinery that will dismember you before you even notice something is wrong. Your mind is so bored by the repetitive tasks it erodes at caution though, so good luck not messing up.
Imagine a never ending machine of molten plastic parts that burn you just a little bit every time you grab one, not enough to be damaging but enough to be uncomfortable, now imagine that machine controls your life for 8 hours with two 15 min breaks and one 30 min break for lunch/dinner.
The machine will speed up when production needs to be up and you have to keep up, you miss two pieces and you are put to the side and someone else will take over, you do it two or three times and you go home without a paycheck.
I’ll take a screaming Karen every time over that fucking piece of shit Greek God punishment type Job
I just got out of a plastics welder job for Schutz tanks, “Greek Punishment ass job” is a very accurate descriptor.
You just reminded me of my short bastard super from one of my old jobs. They put me on the prep deck to get all the wash process water off the parts with compressed air before they go into the paint booth. One day they bump the line up to something like 14 feet per minute and tell me that I should stop the line if I need more time for quality reasons. So I stop the line because water is still seeping out. Fucking Mike whips in there with his private forklift and goes “hey why the fucks the line stopped” and hits the go button. A couple back and forths at shift meetings and I give up, because they’ve got me working 5 or 6 10s and I have lost the ability to give a damn. So now the paint is fouling on every fourth part, and when the facility manager comes round bitching about our reworks guess who gets thrown under the bus?
God I hate manufacturing
Reminded me of What Remains Of Edith Finch, it has a segment working on a line cutting fish heads off. Grab fish, put in guillotine, cut, next, over and over. The monotony and pointlessness of it, and what it does to the psyche.
What were the plastic parts it was making
Probably some piece of the Death Star or something.
Food service is worse.
So many rules and you’re stressed out by management that feels 2 people can run an entire restaurant themselves.
Two people? What do you need two people for? You make the food and then you give it to the customer, it’s not rocket surgery! Now get to it you lazy bum!
Am in management, let me tell you, we fill out all those positions. My boss returns the schedule to me with 1/3rd the number of people i put on it. It’s a nightmare
I’m also in management, and, yeah. Trying to get everything done with such little labour is a nightmare and I end up picking up all the extra work. I don’t want my staff to have to stay late so I do. I’m yet to leave work on time.
My wife did both in a Californian suburb and this is accurate in that retail will make you lose faith in humanity while waiting tables is actually kinda fun but very tiring.
In her case, it wasn’t the Karens but rather the amount of terrible parenting she would witness. One kid shamelessly stole thousands of dollars of Pokemon cards, get caught, and the mother took his side and blamed the store (?!). Plus, so many kids just left there like it’s a fucking daycare, too. Touching and messing up stuff. My wife was working alone most of the time, too!
Not to mention, no chair, no real breaks, minimum pay, and so on. At least with food service, good places have tips and you get to bring home food. If you sell alcohol, it’s extremely lucrative in states that don’t dock your pay. An occasional jump scare is worth making more than an average college grad, and one of her friends opened a sushi place and gives us a discount. Food service is cool.
Walmart gave me constant illness and depression, fast food has just given me grey hairs and chest pain
Corporate retail was worse. I had like 30 minutes of assigned work a day, and for the other 7.5 hours I had to pretend to be busy. It was awful.
I did get really good at balancing stuff on my fingertips, though. And I had the location and price of every item in the store memorized.
Food service was harder work, but shifts went by much faster. I mostly washed dishes and did prep, but subbed for wait staff when needed, and all of it was better than retail. Plus, everyone was high or drunk and management didn’t give a shit.
Why was downtime at the retail gig so bad? Couldn’t you just doodle or mess around on your phone? Seems like you could come up with a creative way to appear busy.
Nope, you had to appear to be busy doing retail like things. Mostly that involved doing the assigned work for others and fronting (straightening up rows of products and bringing them to the front of The shelf).
I wasn’t even allowed to wander around looking for customers to help.
When I worked in retail, you were not allowed to be on your phone or even sit, even if the store was completely empty. You were expected to pretty much stare at the door and manifest customers.
If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean! /S
It has been 17 fucking years since i worked fast food and even just reading this phrase still makes me scream internally every time
For me retail was terrible, fast food was a special type of hell. But working as a busser was far and away the worst and strangest work experience I’ve ever had
What was strange about it?
Everything those other fellows mentioned, plus great stuff like: the manager making me shave my facial hair off before allowing me to work; getting put on 12-hr shifts back to back even though they knew I was a student and had classes; staff expecting me to know everything about the table numbers and layout on my first day and getting pissed when I didn’t; also the amazing capitalist culture of Trying Super Hard So I’ll Be A Line Chef/Mgr One Day and all that comes with it.
I quit after two days and never looked back.
Nasty customers leaving messy tables. Host/server breathing down your neck to bus their section yesterday. Dishwasher disappeared so they need you to pitch in at the dish sink. The bin behind the bar is overflowing.
Where were you?!
Hosts flat seat -> server workflow gets frontloaded -> servers spend all their time greeting and grabbing drinks/setups instead of prebussing -> bussers have to do more work to get a table guest ready -> hosts start to panic as the lobby fills up -> hosts yell at bussers to teleport around the restaurant as soon as a guest so much as thinks about the check -> repeat
All of this just barely works until someone drops a glass in the ice, or we get behind on a starter, or a piece of equipment breaks, or literally anything goes wrong. And that’s just front of house, when you factor in the drama that can happen back of house when we’re understaffed and FOH demands too much too quickly it’s a miracle that there aren’t mass walkouts.
I live in the death spiral. I have a different seat but we’re all on the same damn ride.
Personally I found food service to be much worse.
Depends on what you’re selling, I guess
Yeah this is what I was thinking too. I worked for a mom and pop hobbyist store, and Starbucks. Obviously Starbucks was worse. But would it be worse than, say, a mall clothing store or Target or Walmart? Not sure.
And whether or not it’s corporate
I’d rather work in customer service.
That’s just the Indian in you bro.
That’s racist!!!
Anyway, I thinking how I won’t have to deal with people who are not physically there.
My partner thought this. Turns out, people feel more comfortable causing a scene over the phone than in person.
Of cour -click
I’m Indian too, so think of it as our n-word.
The cs-word if you will.
I wasn’t serious, weren’t three exclamation marks not enough???
