We’ve turned off the usual self-serve butter station and instead are giving customers cups of butter that we pre-pour and seal. It’s to avoid having too many people touching the same surfaces at the butter station. The cups of butter we pre-pour are specifically measured out to be about enough to evenly cover a large popcorn. I’ve just sold a middle-aged customer a large popcorn and I hand him a cup of butter.

Me: “Here’s some butter for your popcorn if you’d like.”

Customer: “Pfft! What’s that?! That’s not enough! You’re trying to be cheapskates!”

Me: “That’s about enough to cover a large popcorn if you drizzle it evenly, but I can give you extra butter, if you’d like.”

Customer: *Furious* “That’s not enough to cover a large popcorn, idiot! Look!”

The customer opens up the butter and pours it straight down, all in one spot without spreading it out at all.

Customer: *Fuming* “See?! Not enough butter!”

Me: “Well, sir, I’ll give you another one, but I’d recommend moving it back and forth as you pour so you can evenly coat the popcorn!”

I hand the customer another butter and he does the exact same thing; he pours the entire cup straight down in the exact same spot without spreading it out at all.

Customer: “Not enough butter!”

Me: “Sir, trust me, if you move the cup back and forth, you’ll see it should evenly coat the popcorn, but I’ll give you another one.”

I hand the customer a third butter, and he does the exact same thing yet again.

Customer: “NOT ENOUGH BUTTER!”

This repeats several more times. I’m practically pleading with the customer to spread the butter out and telling him he’s probably using way too much, and he keeps defiantly pouring the butter into the exact same spot over and over again. Finally, he leaves the concession stand, fuming that we were being “cheapskates” who “wouldn’t give him enough butter!” At the end of the movie, he comes back.

Customer: “Look what you made me do! I couldn’t eat all my popcorn because of you! You gave me too much butter!”

He holds up his popcorn tub, and the bottom of the tub looks like butter soup. There’s way too much butter pooled and a lot of popcorn just sort of floating around in it.

Me: “Well, sir, as I said, the cups were measured out to be about enough to cover a large popcorn if you drizzle it over the top evenly.”

Customer: “But there wasn’t enough to do that! You weren’t giving me enough butter!”

Me: “You just told me I gave you too much butter.”

Customer: “Because you did!”

He stood there arguing for a good minute, alternating between accusing me of not giving him enough butter, and giving him too much butter. Finally, he stormed off.

I specialize in carryout orders and I usually tell customers that we don’t take any more orders thirty minutes before closing time, as people have, more than once, shown up after we closed to get their food. However, our dining room is still open.

I get a call about twenty-five minutes before we close from a woman wanting to place an order. I tell her that, unfortunately, it is too late to order, and she begins to get snippy.

Caller: “We can still dine in but I can’t order takeout?”

Sometimes people order while they’re already sitting in the parking lot, but this isn’t the case.

Caller: “I want to speak to your manager.”

I pass them over.

Manager: “I’ll agree to take the order, as long as you can get here before we close.”

They didn’t show up until almost twenty minutes after we had closed and we let them pay and take their food anyway. I hope they enjoyed their cold food.

I’m in my local pet store buying large bags of cat litter, and they happen to have an eight-kilogram bag of cat food available, so I get that, too. The cashier offers to help me to the car, which they often do with heavy purchases.

Me: “I’m sorry! The car park was unusually full, so I had to park about fifty metres from the store entrance.”

Cashier: *Laughs* “That’s fine! The previous customer wanted their trolley pushed around the entire building to the opposite side.”

That was an approximately 500-metre walk through a busy car park with no footpath and a steep hill. The nerve of some people!

We close at 8:00 pm on weekdays. On this particular day, we aren’t completely finished cleaning, so we close our gate and keep cleaning. A man comes up to our closed gate.

Customer: “Hello!” *Knocks on the gate* “Hello, I need help!”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, we have just closed, but the front store is still open. They can help you.”

Customer: “No, they aren’t a pharmacist. I need a pharmacist.”

Me: “You can come back tomorrow morning; we closed at eight.”

Customer: “But you are still here. Why won’t you help me?”

Me: “Sir, first of all, my gate is closed so I can’t even see you, just as you can’t see me. Second of all, I’m off the clock. You can come back tomorrow when we open at nine.”

The guy walks off in a huff and I hear another customer, probably a friend of his:

Customer’s Friend: “Why are they closed?”

Customer: “I don’t know, ugh!”

Related:
Not Very Closed Minded, Part 45
Not Very Closed Minded, Part 44
Not Very Closed Minded, Part 43
Not Very Closed Minded, Part 42
Not Very Closed Minded, Part 41

I’m a hostess at a local restaurant in my city.

Me: “Hello, y’all! How many are in your party?”

Customer: “We’ll have eight tonight.”

Me: “All right, that’ll be about forty to fifty minutes at the moment.”

Customer: “What?! We called an hour ago and the guy on the phone said it would only be thirty minutes!”

Me: “Yes, that was the wait at that time. It got much busier, though, so our wait time went up.”

Customer: “Fine, I’m putting my name down, but this is ridiculous.”

Ten minutes go by, and I’m calling and seating names that are ahead of this lady.

Customer: “We have been waiting for forever, and you’re calling names that aren’t ours! I want to talk to a manager!”

I get one of my managers, who’s a really chill guy.

Manager: “What’s the problem, ma’am?”

The lady complains to him, telling him that I was skipping over her name and lying to her. The manager looks at the waitlist and the info that I wrote down.

Manager: “Ma’am, you were here for ten minutes. There were other people before you. That’s how time works.”

The lady huffed and went back to her group but kept asking every five minutes how much longer they had to wait. When I sat them, everyone in the group made off-handed comments about the service, trying to rile me up. They ended up leaving a $5 tip on a $70 check.