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I’ve worked my fair share of customer service jobs, so I’m really looking forward to the responses in this article.
I worked at a fast food place and a grocery store in high school, a restaurant in college, and I worked for a catering company and on a food truck in my later years, so I’ve dealt with some d**chebags before.
But now it’s time to hear from some random folks out there!
What’s your craziest encounter with a customer?
AskReddit users shared their customer service nightmare stories.
1. Ouch!
“Worked at a auto parts store for a little over a year. I could write a book on all the stories. This probably wasn’t the craziest, but one of my fondest memories.
Store is closing at 9. Customer comes in at 8:50. D**k move, but whatever. At 9 we lock the doors so no new customers come in. then we walk out anyone left in the store when they are ready. Dude was just casually browsing the store putting stuff in his basket. At 9:05 or so we made an announcement that the store was closed but no rush we will help you when your ready.
Dude just screams at the top of his lungs “fine I didn’t want to buy anything anyways”, throws his full basket on the ground and sprints for the front door. Now before anyone could say anything this dude is already at the door in a full sprint not knowing they were locked and slams straight into them.
We are like WTF is he doing and my manager walks over there unlocks the door and he leaves without saying another word while holding his face. We finish closing up while laughing the entire time.”
2. In the Bible Belt.
“I was a cashier at a Dillons grocery store in the Bible Belt when I was a kid. One day a woman came up to my counter and, in a quiet voice, says “excuse me, you’ve got some ducks out in the parking lot.
Um, they’re mating, and everyone can see it” I didn’t know what the f**k she was talking about, so I just kinda joked about it being that time of year or something, but she continued. “Everyone can see what those ducks are doing, you need to send someone out there right now”.
Lady was serious. She wanted an employee to go outside and c**kblock a duck so kids wouldn’t know what banging was.
I rolled it to my supervisor, who did send a cart pusher to make the lady feel better and ruin some ducks big day.”
3. You’re banned!
“Was working at a local hardware store. average staff age was 20 years old.
It was a hot summer and we were selling REFURBISHED standalone AC units, but were out of stock at the moment. Guy came in asking if he could buy the floor unit. He looked to be in his late 30’s, early 40’s.
Manager said sure, but there would be no discount since we were getting more units in by the end of the week. Guy complained that he should get a discount since the unit had some minor dings and scratches in it (it’s a refurb, mind you). Manager said no and he flipped his s**t.
Started yelling and screaming. Said he was an off-duty police officer and that every one of us were going to get investigated and any dirt we had was going to be brought against us. Spent about 20 minutes acting like a man-child. Everyone working was laughing their a** off at him. Finally he gave up and left. 11 years later and I’m still waiting on that investigation he promised.
Then there were the two ladies who wanted to buy our entire stock of spiral-bound notebooks for a dollar because the sign said something along the lines of “Notebooks: $1″ or something stupid. They reasoned that since it didn’t say each, it meant all of them together were $1.
They literally got into a shouting match with my manager, calling him names and slinging any kind of insults they could before he finally kicked them out and they were banned from coming back.”
4. Jeez…
“Worked at a furniture store.
The delivery and warehouse guys started a few hours before open to load the trucks and the desk peeps usually got there about an hour early that day I had arrived about 2 hours before open to get some stuff done.
There was this guy who was not satisfied that the store wasn’t open so he snuck in through the warehouse and had an absolute fit that there was no one at the counter to help him. He went and found me in the kitchen making coffee and demanded someone serve him immediately and give him a discount for having to go out of his way to find someone to help him.
I couldn’t stop laughing, which set him off. He complained to corporate about poor customer service.”
5. It’s an emergency!
“I had the craziest customers at JoAnn Fabric while working the cutting table.. A fabric store?!?
Let’s just skim over the guy who bought about 10 yards of black fabric, all different kinds (cotton, felt, etc.), and when I (trying to make pleasant conversation while cutting) asked what he was doing with all that black fabric, he explained that the black fabric absorbed the death rays that THEY were aiming at him. He was experimenting with different kinds of fabric to see if one had better absorbency. Oookay.
My favorite was the woman who called on a Sunday evening about 10 minutes before we closed. She HAD to have 15 yards of black and white upholstery cloth, so she wanted me to pull the fabric out and have it ready for her at the cutting table so she could just run in and have it cut.
Ma’am, we don’t have black and white striped upholstery material. Okay, okay, then any black and white upholstery material, and where exactly is our store located?
This is getting weird, to put it mildly. I tell her, and she is a half hour drive away, and we close in 10 minutes. “No, no! You gotta let me get the material. I’m driving as fast as I can. Oops, that light was red! Just have the material all cut out for me! I need 15 yards.”
Now, upholstery fabric is expensive (average price for what we had in the store then was $20/yard), and I was not going to randomly cut into some for some looney tune over the phone. Not to mention, we had no black and white upholstery fabric right then. “Check the back room and cut me 15 yards! Oh, my god, that was close!” she screamed as she came close to crashing her car.
I tried laying down the law: “Stop racing! We don’t have what you want! The store will be closed by the time you get here! Turn around and go home!” I finally hung up on her.
Twenty minutes after we closed, ready to head out the door, she is banging on the door, screaming that she has to get in, and that [My Name] promised that we would let her in. “I told you no!” I yelled back to her. “We don’t have it. Go home!”
To this day I wonder, what the HELL created that emergency need for black and white upholstery fabric on a Sunday evening?”
6. This is wild.
“Back in college, I was an assistant manager of a small gas station.
In the summer time the manager was on vacation, so I was the man in charge of the place. I get this phone call from my overnight cashier, “some dude just waved his d**k at me a the window.”
It was like 1 in the morning. The lady worked overnights was like 65 or something. She was pretty upset. So I come in and roll back the surveillance footage to take a look at what happened and sure enough, her story checked out.
I place a call to the local police department, and then an officer came and I showed him the footage, and this is the best part. The officer recognized this guy. He was teacher at a local middle school.
Not only did he get arrested, but the officer got a search warrant for his home computer because he committed a s** crime (indecent exposure) and had high exposure to 10-13 year olds. Sure enough, he was on the news the next day because he had child porn on his computer.
So, I never encountered this customer directly, but it was a real pleasure bringing a predator to justice. He got 10 years.”
7. No…we don’t.
“Oh I work at Disney World doing retail. Many crazy stories
My favorite one is when I was working at Downtown Disney (2011, so before Disney Springs) and I was at a cart right next to Bongos and they were having a party and it was very loud cause Saratoga Springs resort called in a noise complaint. So I had to yell in order to communicate
Well this one lady comes by and asks me something. I couldn’t hear, so I ask her to repeat herself. She tells me something and I heard her but wasn’t if I heard correctly.
I tell her one more time. She then points to her crotch, does a pump and screams,”do you sell condoms?!!!””
8. A little much.
“I worked at a major American department store. Had a guy come in to return an obviously used toaster. It had toast crumbs coming out of it.
The toaster was probably 15 years old and a brand the store didn’t and had never carried. I refused to do the return, simply because I couldn’t. The guy had nothing but a busted old toaster. He gets pi**ed at me and tells me:
“If people like you were fighting the war we’d all be speaking German.”
I get he was upset…but blaming me for the fall of the free world to the N**is because of a toaster was a little much.”
9. A time to puke.
“I used to work Walmart Christmas season as a cashier when I was in college.
One time this huge fat lady in one of those electric carts s**t her pants while in my line, and it was super busy. Everyone was just kinda looking around like what do we do, and that’s when the second wave hit me. I went into projectile vomiting into the trash can stage and it triggered others into vomiting, and they didn’t have a trash can.
It was quite a scene, and the pants s**tter sat there like nothing was happening the whole time.”
10. Tainted goods.
“Customer didn’t want her items in a plastic bag, but by the time she told me, I’d already scanned them and put them in one (very busy dollar store and I was on auto-pilot).
She lost. Her. S**t. Started wailing that noooooo, she didn’t want her things in a baaag!!!!!!! Even though I immediately took them out and handed them to her she just kept freaking out over it, even as she was walking out the door.
Like her items were somehow tainted by touching a plastic bag for three seconds…”
11. You can’t do that, sir.
“Worked at a supermarket. A guy comes in at around 11 am.
Seemed a bit weird so I decided to follow him at a distance through the store. He got to the milk, which was in the far back corner.
He then looked me straight in the eyes, pulled his pants down, squatted, and proceeded to take a dump on the floor in front of the milk.”
12. Livin’ that Starbucks life.
“Oh boy.
Guy at Starbucks who dropped his change in the tip jar, then demanded to know how much money I make and would not leave me alone about kt, and when I finally said I made just barely above minimum wage, he said I made a living wage and took $5 out of the jar. The average household income in this area is $150k.
A regular at Starbucks would “make change” for herself out of our tip jar by dropping in a $5 or a $10 and taking all the $1s. If we hadn’t cleaned it out after the morning rush, we definitely had more than $10 in there. Same lady also accused me of stealing a $100 bill out of her wallet and threatened to call the cops on me. Three days later she called the store to tell me she found the $100 in her wallet.
Another regular tried to r*e a supervisor in the bathroom, stalked another woman until she threatened to beat his a** to a pulp because he was following her home after work and she was worried he was going to find her kids too, and was only banned from the store when he started in on the 17 year old. He recognized me when I was working at another store and tried to get me to give him a free drink, “oh please sweetie,” and I’m not sure what my face did but he ran out of there pretty quickly.
Working at a discount store I was told I ruined Christmas no less than three times. My offenses were as follows: i did not have 15000 Christmas lights available two days before Christmas, I did not have an ornament of two elves one blonde and one brunette climbing a ladder to put a star on a Christmas tree, and we had “sold out” of our stock of coffee (we hadn’t, it was clearly marked, the lady was just rude and dumb and I was off the clock so I wasn’t gonna show her where it was).
A man made me call the manager up to the front to open my register because a penny I’d given him as change was too dirty and he didn’t think it should count as legal tender. My manager yelled at me to just tell customers to f**k off in the future.”
Okay, now it’s your turn.
In the comments, tell us about the craziest encounter you’ve had with a customer.
Let’s see what you got!