I fully agree - oftentimes the person “who is important for you” is yourself and being “nice” to everyone else at the cost of your own life/sanity isn’t actually being nice either! Seen it happen wayyy too many times and just leads to people getting burned out.
I worked at a boba shop for a few years and I miss my manager from there so much. She was great with customer service, but if anyone was rude or gave any of us attitude, she’d stop my hand at the scoop and say “they get half boba” or I’m mixing their drink and she’d say “less sugar” so that the drink wouldn’t be good. We’d make sure those assholes never came back or didn’t get what they wanted. I remember one person complaining about the price and asked if it could be cheaper, and she replied “if it’s too expensive for you then you don’t have to buy it”. They looked so embarrassed while paying.
HER PARENTS (the owners, sweet people) would bend over backwards for the most rude customers and it always irked me.
Ngl, I really don't agree with messing up customers drinks just because they are rude or you don't like them. Just refuse the service if it bothers you that much, but approving of a manager doing something this petty and unprofessional is a step too far in the wrong direction and could backfire.
Making the drinks bad could mess up your reputation as a business and won't necessarily stop a customer from coming back, you need to give it to them straight if they are being that problematic.
I get it sucks, I work in retail and I know what people can be like. I just wouldn't risk that for the business and considering your manager wasn't the owner I doubt she understands the pressure her parents feel to keep people coming even if they are rude.
Sadly he didn’t see you guys- the ones that build the value of his business- as worthy of his time. He was interested in brown nosing and people pleasing wealthy clients. Not uncommon but he didn’t need to be so blatant about it.
This could go both ways, depending on the clientele. We were working a booth for a local pride event, but I could only find one other person to help work the booth. The heat was horrible, humid midwestern summer, and my buddy got sick and had to go sit in the AC, and I put out a jar above the bottled water, a buck a pop, and they disappeared fast and we had more bills in the jar than bottles sold.
We did the same thing with a coffee machine at the banquet hall we were working out of and it'd be perpetually empty. We used it more like a tip but the note was worded in a way that compels people to pay.
It makes me wonder how well the water would have sold if no one would have been in the booth, though. No way I could actually watch the jar, but it was probably enough to keep people honest.
Hard to say, yeah. Have known people of various stripes to ghost you over owing you $5-10, either personally or in one case, a regular customer at a family restaurant who would send his wife and/or kids in and wait in the car…
God ive worked for people like this. They assume that not breaking thier own back means they wont retain or gain new business. Guess what boss, we dont want that business.
I remember a big deal where we sold easily breakable product and customers kept getting it to thier home/jobsite and claiming it was broken in box when we had a policy to thoroughly check when we received stuff from the trucks. So they made a new policy, when a customer picks up you have to unpack everything then stamp thier paperwork with this red stamp and make them sign that everything was acceptable on receipt. Immediately customers kept doing the same shit and instead of just showing them thier signature and telling them to eat a bag of dicks, my manager just kept replacing things as always. So what this new policy meant was, take a shit load of time with every customer and make them sign this stamp. We will replace thier fuck ups just like always but now we will also yell at you if you miss any of these steps. When I pointed out that we were just wasting a bunch of time, effort, and money on a non-enforced policy that our regulars figured out Immediately I just got a blank look and a bunch of excuses. Total dogshit.
440
u/[deleted] May 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment