37 Wildly Entitled And Rude Customers Who Prove 99% Of People Are Just Giant Tantrum-Throwing Toddlers
“I was blown away that this father, husband, adult man felt like it was okay to say that to a 20-year-old hostess.”
Recently, we asked the former servers and retail workers of the BuzzFeed Community to talk about their worst, most entitled customers, and they had plenty to share.* Here are some infuriating things people dealt with on the job, from wildly entitled requests to straight-up terrible people.
*We also used responses from these three Reddit threads.
1. “I work at a concert venue. I had a customer call the day after the show wanting a refund because the artist did not play his favorite song.”
2. “A table of 30 came into the restaurant I cook at. The manager let us know so we at least had a heads up for the very large incoming order about to be placed. The servers took their orders and entered them in. Everyone on the line started to bust their ass getting this food out. SEVEN FUCKING MINUTES LATER, our manager came back to tell us the table was leaving because we had apparently been taking extremely too long. Not even McDonald’s can serve a 30-set in seven minutes, let alone a casual dining restaurant.”
3. “I worked at a local upscale restaurant in the Midwest. We had bad weather coming in one night that turned from a tornado watch to a tornado warning. I stayed later than the rest of the staff, minus two other managers who were going to stay put since they lived half an hour away and the tornado sirens just went off. I was on my way out the door because I lived five minutes away, and I ran into a 20-person reservation that didn’t answer their phone when we called five times to tell them we were closing due to the tornados. So we were outside in a thunderstorm, with the tornado sirens blaring, and these people could not grasp the situation. They were acting like it was just a normal day. I tried to get reason in their heads for a few minutes, but they were having none of it. So I got the two other managers to deal with it and went home because I couldn’t handle that level of idiocy anymore.”
Advertisement
4. “A lady came into our restaurant an hour before closing time and announced she was having her bridal shower (at our restaurant) of 60 people in about 15 minutes from then. We told her we’d do our best to accommodate them, but we already had a wedding party in our private room (which only seats 50 anyway). We said we were happy to accommodate her group in the regular area, but we warned her that we aren’t set up to just immediately feed this number of people this late at night, all at once. I heard her say, ‘Well, this is ridiculous; I sent out invitations to my guests two months ago!'”
“My manager replied, ‘Well, we didn’t get one of those. You’ve made no reservation, and we’ll do what we can to feed your group, but the meals will not come out at the same time.’ The lady started having a hissy fit about us ‘ruining her dinner.’ She was rude enough that the manager then informed her that we’d love to help her, but a party this large, at no notice, at the end of the night would require a 30% mandatory tip, and we would only stay open long enough to serve their food plus 20 minutes to eat. She stormed out, and a lot of her party ended up just eating dinner at our restaurant (we didn’t enforce the required tip for them) because they had no other option. Most tipped at least 20% anyway. Several of them left glowing reviews for how accommodating we were, how great the staff was, how much they enjoyed the food, etc.”
5. “I’m a long-haul flight attendant. We once had a passenger on a flight who had laid their eight or nine-year-old on the ground to sleep. I asked the mother to politely pick her up as it wasn’t safe. The mother informed me it was safe and pulled the ‘I’ve done it plenty of times before’ line. Things escalated dramatically from here when I insisted she pick her child up. It took 20 minutes of arguing, waking up the entire aircraft, including the Captain and the Purser, and threats of restraint to calm her down. We eventually managed to get the child in the seat with a pillow I had found in the aircraft cupboard.”
“The reason we can’t have anyone on the floor is that in the event of sudden decompression, the masks won’t reach ground level. A person has around four seconds of useful consciousness in a worst-case scenario, so the mother wouldn’t be able to take her mask off to bend down, pick her child up, and put her on oxygen. This is also why we tell you to put your own mask on before assisting others — it’s a hell of a lot easier helping your child with their mask while you’re conscious.”
6. “While I was waiting on an older lady, she fainted and hit her head on the counter on the way down. Everyone went over to help her, talking to her as she regained consciousness, pressing a paper towel to her bleeding head, keeping her calm as we waited for the ambulance, etc. Another lady stepped over her prone body to the counter and demanded to be rung up as she was in a hurry.”
7. “I worked at Walmart. A middle-aged man asked me for moving blankets. I apologized and said since we were a smaller location, we didn’t have any, but if he wanted, I could show him to the bedding department, and he could see if anything may work for him. He agreed. I walked him over and asked if he wanted any further assistance, and he said no. I went along my merry way. 20 minutes later, I looked up, and he was angrily walking towards me to confront me. With a mouth full of venom and his finger in my face, he spat out, ‘YOU should go home and f****** un-alive yourself,’ and he turned on one heel and walked out.”
—Anonymous
Advertisement
8. “I used to work at a buffet as a manager/cashier, and I remember this one customer who wanted a free meal because our food made her ‘throw up.’ She claimed that she threw up in the bathroom, so I went to check up on it. The entire bathroom floor was littered with UNEATEN food straight from the buffet bar. I returned and (politely) called bullshit on her story. Her response, and I shit you not, was, ‘Then are you calling me a liar? Do you really think I’d waste food like that?’ I smugly checked the cameras (we had one facing the hallway leading towards the bathroom) and showed her the footage of her heaping a plate with food, entering the bathroom with said plate, and leaving with a magically empty plate. The look of horror and embarrassment on her face was priceless. She paid in the end, too.”
9. “I was working in the hardware department in the plumbing section. A customer came up to me, clearly looking for help, and when I asked, ‘Can I help you?’ they looked me up and down and said, ‘I want to speak to a man.’ I thought, ‘Oh great, another sexist one,’ and so I found my male co-worker, who barely knew anything about plumbing. The customer seemed upset when my male co-worker could not help him, but as I was still in the vicinity and listening, I was able to chime in when I knew the CORRECT answer to the customer’s question, to which they once again looked me up and down with a scowl and went, ‘Oh…well, I guess I’ll buy that one…'”
“Treat retail workers with kindness. Just…be a decent human being.”
—Anonymous
10. “I’m a restaurant manager. We were short-staffed one day and getting slammed, so I waited on a table to help a server get caught up. When I sat the drinks down, I put them in front of the wrong person at the table. The woman glared at me and then snidely told the man I assumed was her husband, ‘This is why we go to college.’ I just kind of laughed it off, but the day before, I had turned in my thesis to receive my master’s in business.”
—Anonymous
11. “A seven-top table got excellent service. The bill was $140 or so. The person paying the check was friendly, and all smiles…and tipped $0. He waited at the door to see the sad, dejected look on the waitress’s face as she looked at the receipt and gave a Hannibal Lecter smile. You could just tell he derived pleasure from her pain.”
Orion Pictures
Advertisement
12. “I worked in a vitamin store. A lady came in like a bat out of hell and stomped to the counter. She cut the entire line to make a return. She was angry that one of our salespeople sold her a product, and she later saw on Dr. Oz that it really didn’t help much. I told her to please wait in line, and we would get it sorted for her. She was insistent that she be helped now. She said her doctor said it wouldn’t help her, so I asked if her doctor was Dr. Oz. She got so pissed and started to act like a child. The guy behind her was my hero that day. He just calmly said, ‘Calm the fuck down, lady, and wait your turn.’ Customers like that guy make my day as a retail employee. Not all heroes wear capes; some wear tank tops too big for them that expose their nipples.”
13. “I work in a bagel shop. I was grabbing a customer’s dozen bagels and had the box ready in my hands when my manager walked past and said, ‘I gotta sneeze.’ She went to the back so she wasn’t germing the place up. I turned to look back at the customer, and he was staring me dead in the face. He said, ‘You can sneeze in my box.’ I froze. What do I even say to that? Why on earth do you think you get to bring that s**t into my store? And how do you STAY after you utter those words in public to an unsuspecting food worker instead of spontaneously combusting on the spot out of embarrassment??? My autopilot took over as I grabbed his bagels and got him out of the store. My manager says he’s been suggestive to her in the past. We quote him all the time now, and it takes everything in me when he visits the store (yes, he still eats here) not to shout, ‘SNEEZE GUY!'”
—Anonymous
14. “I work for a tax agency, and taxpayers can be assessed a late payment fee if they don’t pay their taxes in full by a specific date, usually based on how much they owed and when they filed their tax forms. These fees can be waived, but they are one-time things and may or may not have a dollar limit. One afternoon, I got a call from a man who is a ‘high earner’ (between $3 and $4 million a year of income). He had a history of not paying his taxes on time and had already had roughly $8000 in fees waived over three different years, and now he was demanding I waive another year of fees totaling nearly $2000. His reason for not filling in time, he said, was he had brain cancer that particular tax year.”
“Now, I’m as empathetic as the next guy, but this guy started the conversation with me with this, and he brought it up constantly during the conversation, to the extent I was beginning to suspect he was lying about it. I also had a brother die of brain cancer a few years ago, and some of the things the man was saying weren’t tracking with what I knew of the illness based on what I knew my brother went through.
Advertisement
Either way, given he’d already had so many waivers (based on the notes I saw on his account, he had a long history of calling in and using a serious illness of some sort as a reason to give him a waiver), I was unable to give him a fourth waiver and neither could my supervisor. He argued with me for easily a half hour, with me giving him the same answer. He finally said, ‘Well, I hope you or someone you love gets brain cancer and dies from it!’
I hung up on him at this point because all I could think about was my brother, who did die from brain cancer, who was poor as a church mouse and would never talk to someone the way this man talked to me. The wealthy are extremely toxic and entitled people, especially when it comes to their money.”
Advertisement
15. “I worked a late night cocktail shift in a cardroom at 21, and a guy my age was playing poker and ordered a steak. When it was brought to him, he asked me if I could cut it up for him. The rest of the players were all older guys, and luckily, they made fun of him enough that he changed his mind.”
“I had another guy that was also the same age and a decently good-looking guy, but he gave like a super creepy American Psycho vibe and would ask me for back massages at the table and follow me around.”
—Anonymous
16. “We had a customer slip and fall on our property. It was freshly shoveled and salted but still slippery. For the next eighteen months, every time she wanted us to break the rules for her, she would say, ‘Well, I DID fall on your property — you owe me’ or ‘I could have sued the pants off you, but I didn’t.’ I think our organization’s attorney finally sent her a cease-and-desist letter because I haven’t seen her since.”
—Anonymous
17. “A man threw a hissy fit (in front of his young daughter) because we didn’t have a product that he drove THREE HOURS to buy SPECIFICALLY. It wasn’t a fantastically popular product so we didn’t keep a lot in stock. We’d just sold the last one on the shelf the week before, and he hadn’t called ahead to ask if it was in stock. He demanded we sell him the half-used sample bottle and complained when we refused because we weren’t allowed to (for health and safety reasons). We offered to check if the store a few miles away had any in stock, but he refused, saying he had already driven far enough. We offered to order it for him and have it shipped to his house and would make him a sample to last him until it arrived, but he also refused and insisted that we either sell him the sample bottle or he would never come to our store again. To his credit, I never saw him again.”
“If you have to drive a long way to get a product, maybe call to make sure it’s in stock before you make the trip. Also, don’t be an asshole in front of your kids. His poor wife looked so embarrassed.”
