By Victoria Rouch
HONK! As if the drive-through commotion isn’t loud enough with the kids in the car at the speaker shrieking at each other, now some impatient jerk things laying on his horn is going to make the line move! Nobody likes dealing with a difficult customer. The popularity of the saying ‘The customer is always right’ doesn’t help things much, either. If the customer is always right, they are always happy. However, in the retail industry you find out that the customer is hardly ever right, and even if you abide their every whim, they are usually not very happy. Working at Starbucks I deal with these people every day. There are four types of difficult customers that I deal with daily at Starbucks. These include slow customers, impatient customers, angry and rude customers and the occasional creep.
Slow
customers are the least difficult. They
order slowly, they come through the drive through slowly, and they are slow to
pick up their drink. There is a couple
that comes through our drive thru every night.
They stop at the speaker and wait about a minute before saying, slowly,
“I’d like a tall skinny cinnamon dolce latte with breve and one pump of white
mocha.” Then they sit at the speaker for
about 30 more seconds after we’ve taken their order. They then drive up to the
window. We all know that by ‘skinny’
they mean ‘with whipped cream’. They also usually want another drink the same
way, they just don’t order it until they get to the window because they’ve
forgotten, most likely because they are stoned. This causes the line to get
backed up because we have to make a whole other drink that should have been
started before they even drove up to the window.
Impatient
customers are usually the ones in a hurry, or those that are under the
impression that their order is more important than everyone else’s. A lot of customers make it a habit to stop by
Starbucks on their lunch break or on their way to work. If I am late for work, I don’t stop. I drive
as fast as possible to get to work so I’m not late, and so I don’t get
fired. These customers come in, even
when the drive-thru line is overflowing and the parking lot is jammed
full. There is one girl that comes in
and orders a venti caramel macchiato with lots of whip cream and an extra espresso
shot. Espresso shots take at least 18 seconds to come out of the machine so
that is time consuming in itself. She will then
order some cookies, which we have usually run out of by the afternoon shift, go
to the bar and wait for her drink, and stare down whomever is making it. She will roll her eyes and sigh “I’m late for
work can you hurry up?’” Another
impatient customer I dealt with recently was a trucker whom ordered a coffee
with a shot of espresso and steamed milk.
His drink was next in line to be made.
When I picked up the drink just
before his he looked at me and yelled, “Oh, we’re gonna play that game are
we?!”
I was so shocked! I calmly said
“Sir, this drink was in line before yours, so I’m making if first. Yours will
be right out.” He just huffed and puffed something about having to get on the
road, and I stifled the urge to spit in his drink as I handed it out.
Most
of the time the customers whose drinks I really want to spit in are the angry
and rude ones. There is a man who comes
in every day named Paul. Paul gets a grande coffee with light ice and refill
after refill after refill of the same drink.
When I take Paul’s order he doesn’t speak to me; he just assumes I know
what he’s getting. If I ask him what he
wants, just to make sure he doesn’t want to change it up a bit, he talks down to
me and throws his Starbucks Gold card across the counter. Another rude regular
is a woman named Lisa. We all dread having to deal with Lisa. She always asks
us to do ridiculous things, and if we don’t do them, she gets ridiculously mad. One day she asked Abby to put her drinks in a
paper bag so they wouldn’t make a mess in her car. Obviously Abby thought that was a dumb idea
so she handed Lisa a bag so she could do it herself. Lisa then called corporate to complain that
we were not making her drinks correctly and that we are rude to her. As awful
as Lisa encounters are, the worst experience I’ve ever had with a customer was
with a man traveling with his family.
One day his preteen daughter came in and ordered a venti Vanilla Bean
frappucino with caramel. Now, when you order a drink with caramel you will get
it with caramel flavoring. I made her
drink in this way. She took it and left.
A few minutes later her father came storming in.
“This
isn’t what she ordered! Make my drink right!” The assistant manager, Tina,
tried to explain to him that the drink he was holding was exactly what his
daughter had ordered.
“No, it’s usually brown, it’s usually brown.” he kept
saying. Finally we realized he wanted caramel drizzle inside the cup and on top
of the whipped cream. I graciously
remade his drink after suggesting he order the drizzle next time so we knew
exactly what he wanted. The next day the
same family came through the drive thru and ordered a vanilla bean frappucino
with caramel. Guess what I made! When the man got to the window and the drive
thru barista handed out his drink, he lost it.
“This isn’t what we ordered!” He
screamed through the sliding window as it tried to close on Tina. “It’s really
sad that you guys can’t get this right!” Tina tried to reason with him, and
then tried to tell his daughter why she had received her drink incorrectly
again. The man yelled “Don’t yell at my daughter!” At that point Tina burst
into tears. Sue, the store manager came
to the drive through and gave the man five certificates for free drinks just so
he would leave. I am always thankful that he was just travelling through and
that I don’t have to deal with him on a regular basis.
Rude
customers seem like terrible people until you associate with the creepy
ones. There is a man that comes into
Starbucks every night in a dirty orange sweatshirt. His white hair is always a mess and his eyes
never rest on one spot, like they’re chasing an invisible fly. We are polite to him but as soon as we hand
out his drink he will stand and stare at me for a good three minutes. He used to try and talk to me about anything
and everything but lately I have stopped acknowledging him, because if I engage
him he will stay in the store for 20 minutes.
Yet another encounter I had with a ‘creepy’ customer was when I went on
break a couple weeks ago. I grabbed my
free drink from the handout plane and went to sit in the corner. As soon as I sat down a middle aged man with
glasses walked up to me.
“Do you go to the university? He said.
“Excuse
me?”
“Do
you go to the college out here?”
“Uhh,
yeah.”
He then continued, “Oh okay well I just wanted to say that I’m a pastor
and you should keep Jesus Christ in your life and have a good day.” And then he
left. I immediately got up and walked to the back room where I sat down on the
stool. I told Sue what had happened and
she promptly told me that man is a sex offender. I will never sit in the lobby again.
Probably
the creepiest man I have ever encountered at Starbucks was the homeless man
that strolled right up to the drive through window between me and a customer’s
car, trying to exchange his coin rolls for cash. I had no idea what to do so I
called my shift supervisor, Brett, over. Brett hurriedly exchanged the coins
and got the man out of the drive through as quickly as possible, then hurriedly
apologized to the appalled customer. After this ordeal we finally opened the
rolls of “dimes” only to find out that they were actually pennies and the
homeless man had swindled us out of fifteen dollars. Brett called the police to warn them that people
were doing this kind of thing, and as he was on the phone the man stumbled over
to our ‘Thank You’ sign and peed on it.
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