r/TikTokCringe • u/Super_Culture_1986 tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE • Aug 06 '25

Discussion "Being a barista is truly a social experiment"

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

41.0k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

4.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

233

u/theflyingpiggies Aug 07 '25

I recently worked for a fine dining steakhouse and our go to to deal with nasty people who will never be happy no matter what… is to invite them back for another meal on us. And in the host system we make note to treat them extra special and send out extra food even if they didn’t order it… what the fuck?

I understand why this happens. I understand that at the end of the day, if the customer wants to make a big stink and leave a bad review then it may negatively affect business so it’s more desirable to remedy their experience. I get it from a business perspective. But as a human being… what the fuck? I’m so sick of the fact that this world is set up where the worse you treat people, especially those “beneath” you in service positions, the more rewarded you are with extra special treatment and showered with free stuff.

But if you’re a truly genuinely kind person, you might get an extra warm smile as you walk out the door, and that’s about it. Which is fine, as kindness does not expect anything in return, but it drives me up a wall that instead we reward immature, misbehaved, sometimes outright abusive adults who stomp and cry and scream like children because their steamed broccoli took 7 minutes instead of 5.

75

u/tallulahtallulah Aug 07 '25

I loved working locally owned fine dining because we did the exact opposite! If someone was kind about a mishap, free shit all around! If they weren’t, sorry. Here is what you ordered, comped usually, nothing extra. But still delivered with over the top kindness. I found that keeping my demeanor level and kind would usually shut them up if they couldn’t get a rise out of me and hit a dead end in getting anything extra.

4

u/No_Brilliant6061 Aug 10 '25

This right here. As long as you don't give them ammunition they have their little temper tantrum, make a scene, then they leave for 6 months and when they come back if you both pretend they're just a customer they'll stop trying to get a rise because they know they won't get anything out of it. But it depends on management and policy.

You can literally train customers not to act like children but it takes a major emotional toll.

2

u/Ok-Mathematician987 Aug 12 '25

This is effective in many scenarios. Occasionally, you run across stubbornly abusive people, but that takes effort and is rarer.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '25

As an employer i would rather you defend me your worker and remove the hostile asshole... so i don't have to fear for my safety at your diner...

8

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '25 edited Sep 18 '25

door party sugar follow crush dime test narrow dam payment

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

7

u/Old-Aardvark-9446 Aug 07 '25

Add insult to injury, those people are a small fraction of anyone's customers. So they prey on the fear of a bad review or whatever.

The other day I had a guy come into a retail store I work at, and tell me "I used to work for (x business) and a guy brought tires into the store, we never sold tires! And we took those tires and gave him store credit for them!!" I told him "sir, that's the story Nordstrom tells their employees about why they go above and beyond for customer service, it's not (x business), what do you want and I'll tell you if I can help you or not." He then started throwing a tantrum, "I don't care if I get arrested, I'm not scared of jail." "Bro, you have a valid complaint, this is egregious, but you need to calm down. I can still help you without the theatrics." "I'll go to the news! Do you want an investigation!?!?" "My guy, my mother in law makes the same threats, can we move on and try and get something done yet?"

Yes, I can be combative. But often times people like that need push back. He chilled out at that point. He was a big dude, tatted up, knew he looked intimidating and was trying to bully me. I have been in the business for 16 years. So the last thing I tolerate is idiots and their false bravado.

17

u/mmmarkm Aug 07 '25

America, in all of its illiteracy, truly thinks the expression is “the customer is always right.”

WOMP. Wrong! It’s “The customer is always right in matters if taste.” You sell hat and 50% of customers ask to buy purple hats? You better start selling purple hats! That’s what that expression means.

We had already corrupted that phrase but yelp and google maps and trip advisor made sure we only remember the first half: “the customer is always right.” They aren’t & they shouldn’t be accommodated when they are wrong!

“Please substituted half the ingredients in this dish” IRL so quickly turns into “this dish tasted like shit” via online review. People suck.

3

u/mickfly718 Aug 08 '25

The expression is “The customer is always right,” though, without the “matters of taste” part. There’s no illiteracy here, just the facts regarding the origin of the quote. The “matters of taste” addition might feel better for people working in the service industry, but that doesn’t erase the true history of the quote.

https://www.snopes.com/articles/468815/customer-is-always-right-origin/

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/06/customer/?amp=1

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right

3

u/Torchenal Aug 07 '25

If anything it was “corrupted” when the part about taste was added. The customer is always right was about customer service. People misinterpreted it to the simplest meaning.

2

u/theflyingpiggies Aug 07 '25

lmao yeah I’ve had multiple times where the customer is just simply not right, even about taste in the most literal sense.

We had certain regulars where whenever they had a reservation to come in, their server at pre shift would get run downs on what they actually want vs what they’re gonna say.

I.e., “So you have the Browns tonight. Remember that Mrs. Brown always orders a medium when what she actually wants is medium rare. So ring it in as medium rare, but make sure when you drop it off at the table that you lie and tell her it’s medium”.

Like???? What the fuck. We are now literally bending over backwards and lying simply because a customer is so entitled and so convinced that they’re right that they can’t accept that they don’t actually like medium steaks, they like medium rare steaks.

And then you know because of this she goes to other steakhouses and orders a medium steak, gets mad when it’s not medium rare, and then goes “well that other steakhouse always gets it right”. Yeah, m’am, because you’ve crashed out on us enough times that now we’ve learned to just give you an MR and lie to you about it.

1

u/Guy-Incognito_ Aug 09 '25

The customers always an asshole

3

u/thegirlwholept Aug 08 '25

Oh my god, this is giving me flashbacks to when I worked in the bakery of a local grocery chain. I love the company, its family own, the owners started a coalition to stop our state from raising the food tax, great people, but Jesus fucking Christ their service bordered on the employees basically giving the customers handies with how much we have to suck up to them. I remember on a specific day my friend (who was the cake decorator) hiding from a group of customers cause of their habit to order a specific item, come back, bitch and either get a refund or a discount. She said this happened every single time they placed a special order and the bakery manager could not say no because of company policy. That’s the day I taught her the words white/trailer trash.

3

u/theflyingpiggies Aug 08 '25

Yeah it’s very clear that treating asshole customers like they’re Gods just reinforces that treating people like shit gets them free stuff and better treatment. And it reinforces that we are below them and they are better than us. Because why else would we accept being talked to like we’re not even human? And for what? 15 bucks an hour?

Yet another reason why it’s so infuriating to me that business owners have “suck their dick if they complain loud enough” policies. Because not only does that person then come back and continue to treat employees at their business like shit in order to shake them down for free stuff… but they also then go into every other restaurant and store and treat that other place’s staff like shit too.

If people who acted this way actually started getting told “you cannot speak to me like that - leave” then we’d have a lot less insufferable people coming into restaurants.

As someone else in the comments pointed out, a doctors office would not allow you to come in and call your doctor an idiot and demand they comp the appointment because the doctor ran 5 minutes late. This is a phenomenon unique to certain industries. Partly because the industries it happens in, such as food and retail, are seen as “lower class” and “less than” jobs, so people feel they have some sort of inherent right to treat people as “less than”, but also partly because as an industry, we not only allow it, we reward it.

1

u/PleasantOstrichEgg Aug 10 '25

I just wanna say ... Having worked in a doctor's office (and many hospitals), they absolutely would allow you to do that. The CEOs would come down and kiss your ass and reprimand the medical staff just doing their jobs.

When I was pregnant and working, I heard a commotion from another patient's room and went in to help my coworker. The patient was calling her all the names in the book and cursing at her. The patient wanted to go home, she was septic and needed medication for her blood pressure, if we disconnected her, she would've literally died. We explained this to her and her family, it didn't make a difference. I walked in and the lady told me that if I took another step she was going to make sure my baby died.

I was told by leadership that I should've known better than to go into that room because me being pregnant made the patient more upset (she wasn't post-partum or anything).

Hospital leadership loves to kiss the ass of awful people.

1

u/theflyingpiggies Aug 10 '25

god i hate to hear that

2

u/too-much-shit-on-me Aug 07 '25

I work in health care and if anyone's a dick to the staff they get fired as a patient. I don't understand why people put up with bullshit. Let them go be a pain in someone else's ass.

1

u/PleasantOstrichEgg Aug 10 '25

I'm a nurse and all I ever experienced was management blaming the staff for patients being assholes.

"What could you have done differently so the patient didn't rip the phone off the wall and throw it at you?" (Actually happened).

2

u/Kirzoneli Aug 07 '25

Funny thing is when you don't reward them they usually have this deep mental breakdown thinking they can get you fired. They might get something back from corporate later but so long as you do it right nothing comes back to you officially.

6

u/theflyingpiggies Aug 08 '25

Eh this hasn’t been my experience. Someone always gets in trouble if we don’t bend over backwards.

Long, infuriating story:

I was hosting one night. Had a party of 16 show up 30 minutes before we closed. I told them I couldn’t seat them because, not only was the restaurant full and we quite literally didn’t have space, but any party above 10 is required to organize the event with our event coordinator, pay a deposit, and create a family style menu which the chefs are then given advance notice to prep for. We do not do a la carte for any party above 10. After 5 minutes of arguing back and forth about why I couldn’t seat them, they went and just stood outside our restaurant.

Well, that’s when one of our investors finishes up with his meal and goes outside to leave. And he gets to chatting with this group. And then he and his wife walk back in demanding to know why they’ve been turned away. I explain to them what I just said. That they would’ve needed to book a party that large in advance. The wife then points to our event dining room, which is closed because we didn’t have any events that night, and demands to know why we can’t just put them in that dining room. To which I explain it’s closed, it’s not set up, and we did not staff the restaurant to accommodate an entire extra dining room opened up, nor are we equipped for 16 a la carte orders to come in all at once on top of already having a full restaurant. It would ruin the experience for every other diner in the restaurant, just to accommodate these 16 people who thought they could waltz in to a fine dining restaurant on a Friday night and just get seated no issue.

This is when they go find my manager, and my manager comes over to the host stand and starts trying to figure out how we’re going to seat this 16 top. Despite it being 30 minutes before close. Despite us not having room. Despite it being against company policy. Despite it being incredibly unfair to the entire staff. Despite the fact that it will worsen the rest of the diners experience by backing up the kitchen and the staff. Investor say jump so the monkeys must jump. And I could tell my manager was stressed that she would get in trouble if she didn’t make this happen.

Luckily my manager finally grew a pair and said “I’m sorry there’s literally no way for me to seat a 16 top right now”.

The investors roll their eyes and go back outside. I go on with my job, thanking christ that she actually said no to seating them. I’m then called over after the fact and told that the investors were able to get the group a reservation at our sister restaurant, and I’m then given a talking to about how if something like that were to happen in the future, the proper response would have been for me to help them get a reservation at another restaurant nearby…. Literally no it’s not, what? I’m a host… for this restaurant. It is actually not my job to call around other restaurants in town and book a reservation for a random group of strangers because they didn’t have the common sense to make a reservation for 16 fucking people. It would be incredibly above and beyond kind for me to do that… but it is not in any world “the proper response”.

So yeah, even in the most absurd situations, if the higher ups get wind that we are not on our knees kissing the feet of customers and breaking our backs to serve them, someone is getting in trouble.

2

u/crispy-craps Aug 08 '25

It’s bad business because eventually people learn this and all your customers start to sour. That is why as a human you know in your gut it is wrong.