Customer Places Mobile Order While in Drive-Thru, Demands Employees Make It Right Away
Published July 19 2023, 9:35 a.m. ET
It can always be a bit frustrating whenever you're trying to give a company your money and it feels like the business is taking its sweet time serving you or ringing up your items so you can just be on your merry way.
If you're visiting a Walmart late at night and for whatever reason, store management thought it would be a good idea to staff a single cashier, despite there being numerous checkout lanes available.
Or if you sit down at a restaurant and it takes 20 minutes before someone actually comes to your table to take your order, and then another 40 minutes before your food even comes out.
On the flip side, however, there are numerous instances of customers who've got an itchy emotional trigger finger and will fly off the handle at the slightest inconvenience.
And there are some folks who try and set impossible expectations when they're ordering grub, like this one person who is being criticized for their behavior in the drive-thru.
In a TikTok posted by @Idontlikeppl, a customer records themselves talking with drive-thru employees, asking why their mobile order isn't ready.
Judging from their conversation, it would seem that the customer was upset the order they placed moments before they pulled up to the window wasn't ready and called the workers out for asking him to pull up and off to the side.
In situations like this, fast food restaurants will often ask customers to pull up and wait in the parking lot and a worker will run their food out to the customer. However, the man in the car didn't sound like he wanted to get out of the drive-thru and would much rather wait in front of the window, as he says there was no one behind him.
The employees tried calmly explaining to the guest that they were working on fulfilling his order, but that answer didn't seem to sit right with the drive-thru customer: "Yes sir it does take a few minutes before we make them," one of the employees, a woman wearing glasses, tells the man.
"No I understand that but there's no one behind us if there was someone behind us we would pull up, there's no one behind us and I already spoke to your DM and he already said we don't have to pull up," the customer can be heard saying off camera.
At this point in their discussion, another employee approaches the window to speak to the man and begins to talk to him about mobile orders, however, the customer seems intent on staying in the drive-thru lane: "You can call your district manager he already knows that we don't have to pull up it's your policy."
"Well when you place a mobile order, we have to have time to make it."
"Right, and y'all can go ahead and make it there's no one behind us."
The employee looks out at the drive-thru lane and explains to the man, "Okay so what we do because we have this timer-"
The man then begins to cut the employee off and begins to talk further stating that he won't move, and the worker instructs him to pull up multiple times before the man counters and tells her to call the restaurant's district manager.
She tells him that she won't and he can call the manager and that he should pull up to the front or she's going to call the police for not clearing the drive-thru.
"Call the police on what?" the man says. The woman doubles down and says, "I will because you won't move out my drive-thru."
"You're gonna lose your job I hope you know that."
"Okay well go ahead."
"You really wanna lose your job?"
"Hey, do what you gotta do. You think you can control me having a job then you go ahead." the woman tells the man and another employee can be heard laughing inside the restaurant.
Viewers who saw the clip didn't seem too impressed with the way the drive-thru customer conducted themselves. One person wrote: "He didn't want food he wanted an argument."
While another remarked, "I love her so much for saying that. I love that customers think they have that much influence in situations like that"
And then there was one commenter who speculated as to why some people decide to try and make fast food workers' lives miserable: "I think ppl just do this to feel something"
While someone else noticed a dynamic shift in the conversation once the customer realized he couldn't scare the employee into getting his way by threatening her job: "She took all his ‘power’ away with that last sentence. YES MAAM."