Quickly, I’m going through some final rounds of edits on an article I’m writing for Reader’s Digest and they want some tales (by the end of today!) of consumers making unreasonable and crazy requests (We need to round out a little counterbalance to the otherwise ass-kicking stories and tips about getting great customer service). Can you think of any? Either stories from our site or news stories you’ve seen or stories from your life.. So far we’ve got the judge who sued the Korean dry-cleaner for $54 million for losing his pants, the bride who sued a florist for $400,000 for using the wrong shade of flower, and a traveler who was kicked off a plane for refusing to remove her meter-long stuffed crocodile from the emergency exit aisle. Can you think of any others? Since we usually focus on good consumers and bad companies, it’s a little hard for me to come up with good examples! Leave your thoughts in the comments.
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@girly: This is pretty common in Europe. Mind you they don’t do it for just anyone. You have to be on their ‘list’ of elite customers who buys EVERYTHING new EVERY season. So they know that person will be dumping literally hundreds of thousands of dollars which is probably more than the store will make the entire day.
If you are on the ‘super elite’ you don’t even go to the store. They come to your hotel or home and showcase all their new stuff that the store doesn’t even have, and some stuff that will never hit the retail stores. The rich have a very strong sense of brand loyalty which the luxury companies are eager to exploit.
Some of my favorite pastimes is to raise hell with companies – even though I do not have problems with them. Many companies will react with some free offers or products just to make you “go away”. In fact, I’m writing a book titled “Bitch to Get Rich – Successful Strategies for Making Money”.
Just today, I called Best Buy, claiming to have just bought a $4200 HDTV and their Direct TV disk and receiver package. I told them that I was installing the dish and my TV broke. When the clerk asked me what happened, I said that I had the TV up on the roof with me while installing the dish (in order to make sure that I aligned the dish properly. I claimed that the big screen TV slipped off the roof and fell 35 feet. I said that I’d be in with the bits and pieces of the TV so that I could get a replacement or get my money back.
I told them that I was pretty angry about the whole matter and I was in no mood for any kind of “fast talk” or, worse yet, rejection of my demand. I told him that I and several of my “business associates” would be in the store in about 1 hour. I then hung up.
I imagine that calls like that give the sales people something to talk about and worry about.
At least once a day in the pharmacy, we’re asked by a customer to break the law. And when we don’t, of course, we’re providing horrible customer server. Sheesh.
@Rode2008: soooo, you’re just kind of a jerk then? in your next life you will be an intelligent person who inexplicably cannot get any job aside from the most mind-numbing of all retail.
My fiance works at Enterprise’s call center. His best call was around 11pm. A woman, very drunk, locked her keys in the car. Now, mind you, Enterprise will call AAA if you do this and try to have someone unlock the door. Her choice, break the rear window. Then call Enterprise, tell them SHE broke the window, want a note made about it on her file that it was damaged, because she bought the insurance and a new car. Now. At 11pm. In the middle of nowhere.
I worked at Daytimer several years ago, taking inbound orders from customers. Promotion cards had been sent out offering a binder and a year of calendar pages for free, it was actually a pretty good deal… Anyway one evening a woman called and she started off our exchange by saying “I want a daytimer and I’m black.” Okey Doke… I was already speechless… by the time she got to spelling out her name for the personalized engraving “D as in Death, E as in Evil, L as in Lynch, O as in Oppressed, R as in Revolting…, I was in tears. Needless to say, I’ve never forgotten her name, but I won’t spell out the whole thing for you. I don’t know who shit on her breakfast that day, but it sure as hell wasn’t me…
Another, even though I know you are past your deadline: I once delivered pizza to a young mother who had at least one child at home… when I arrived at thier door I realized i’d forgotten the sodas, I gave her the pizza and told her she could pay when I returned. When I got back, I went and knocked, and she didn’t answer the door. I could hear her son inside saying “Mommy she’s back”, and then I heard the mom shushing him. She never did answer the door. I was floored, not only had she basically stolen a pizza, she had done it in front of her son, and she had stolen it from someone who KNEW WHERE SHE LIVED! My manager called her when I returned to the store, she actually answered the phone, but then hung up when my manager said who was calling. That woman was pretty lucky I am a rational person, or I could have taken such revenge on her. Considering that I KNEW WHERE SHE LIVED!
@SkokieGuy:
The coffee lawsuit myth has been debunked repeatedly.
There were plenty of errors to go around. The primary error was that McDonalds was serving coffee at higher-than-mandated temperatures, which left them wide-open for a lawsuit, given that the health department had warned them on multiple occassions that they were holding the coffee at too high a temperature.
People often invoke the “coffee is best served at…” mantra, but that doesn’t provide an answer for why McDonalds was violating local health and safety regulations, which is the point on which the case was won.
@FLConsumer: Or Target or Mervyn’s or Kohl’s for that matter.
@forgottenpassword: Because no one gets a knife and fork at Weinerschnitzel.
@mon0zuki: Forgetting are we that the Today Show had too fuzz out parts of her because her clothing was too skimpy for television?
@forgottenpassword: Perhaps there is a local restriction against interfering with local wildlife.
@danisaikou:
Please tell me that wasn’t at a Las Vegas store. x_x; I frequent Borders, and if I were followed around, I’d probably toss a dictionary at the pervert.
I’ve worked in customer service positions for over a decade, so I have all kinds of horror stories, but this one has to be one of my favorites:
Working at a major bookseller one Saturday night at the customer service desk. A middle age, somewhat frumpy woman comes up and asks for a book by Tupac. I was somewhat taken aback that a forty-something housewife would be looking for this, but I figured it was for her kid and did a search.
The only thing I could find was a book of urban poetry that had some poems by Mr. Shakur. I explained this, and the woman told me, no, to look again, that it was a new age book about healing or something. Now I’m really confused. I ask if she knows who Tupac is, and she says, yes, of course she does, he was on one of the morning shows that very day.
This being 1999 or 2000, and Tupac having been dead for sometime at this point, I explain gently that possibly she’s looking for someone else.
Well, she lost it. She called me an idiot, screamed about incompetent people and why minimum wage is too much to be paying us….you name it, she screamed it. I called my manager, and as soon as she came out, the lady started shouting her story again. She saw TUPAC (emphasis added by her) on a MORNING SHOW promoting his BOOK, but this IDIOT couldn’t use a goddamned SEARCH engine to find this VERY POPULAR BOOK, and how could I say he was DEAD when she saw him with her VERY OWN EYES.
The manager tried to calm her down, but she was having none of it. At that point, a customer passing by who has heard her insane tirade kind of interjects that she was watching the same morning show, and that it wasn’t Tupac…it was Deepak Chopra.
Of course, there were no apologies offered by her, just more muttering about the idiots who should have been able to figure out what she was talking about.
Hilarious.
I had to add a tip to the stuffed croc story: Use a Spacebag. Stuff the toy in, squeeze it down, put it in luggage, and enjoy your flight.
@aduzik: I didn’t put drip coffee in it – I made a proper cappuccino. The customer was the one insisting it should have regular coffee in addition to espresso/foam/milk.
@danisaikou: I guess you worded it incorrectly:
“…refused to acknowledge that cappuccinos were supposed to contain regular drip coffee in addition to espresso.”
Define “outrageous”.
If I order a steak well done and they serve it to me medium rare, and I eat it and then refuse to pay, that’s outrageous. But I don’t do that.
If I order a steak well done and they serve it to me medium rare, and I don’t eat it and refuse to pay, that’s not outrageous. I have and will continue to do that.
I’m perfectly willing to pay for what I asked for, I’m just not willing to be ripped off or served an inferior product, food or otherwise. Anyone who has a problem with that doesn’t belong on this website.
@dweebster: Oh, not the bleeding heart McDonald’s defense again.
Read the ACTUAL FACTS about what McDonald’s knowingly did despite over 700 formal *reports* of people burned by their coffee because they kept it far above the proper temperature:
[www.lectlaw.com]
<snip>
“The judge called McDonalds’ conduct reckless, callous and willful.” ’nuff said…
I’m no defender of McRotten’s, but I always found the “too hot” complaints to be beyond ludicrous. Or maybe it’s just my background.
My parents are British emigrés and they still make tea the same way: boiling water poured onto the teabags, then start drinking it within five minutes of making it. Hell, I still make and drink it that way, hot enough to scald you. My old lady still makes coffee with a percolator as well (effectively, boiled water).
The idea that McRotten’s coffee is “too hot” sounds more like carelessness of the customer than misconduct by McRotten’s.
@satoru: So I guess the point is that the only truly ‘outrageous’ customer request is when a customer asks for something the store has decided they didn’t or couldn’t pay enough for.
@KogeLiz: No, it was worded correctly:
“I made her a cappuccino that wasn’t to her satisfaction and … refused to acknowledge that cappuccinos were supposed to contain regular drip coffee in addition to espresso.
The subject is “I”.
Ignore this comment – Just trying to fix the ongoing italics issue
@noquarter: Damn.
Something seems to have stripped out my tags.
Do we get a cut of your check from RD for helping?
@Rode2008: A real troll. Imagine that an employee would get a heart attack, because of the stress sustained by you idiotic jokes…
I hope someone will get back at you, because you’re harassing PEOPLE. Each employee is a HUMAN, that deserves respect.
The day something really bad happens to you, you’ll know why.
Thomas writes:
“About 2 months ago my mother my wife and I were in the drive-thru line of a McDonald’s restaurant. The woman in front of us in line, we could hear here, asked for 30 sugars with her coffee (She only ordered one coffee). The cashier clearly confused, gave her two extra sugars and said that was all they could give her. The customer then proceeded to become hostile and curse at the young girl working the window while her children were in the car. My mother was appalled and we apologized to the poor young girl when it was our turn. I hate to think about the lessons this woman was teaching her children about how to treat people in the service and food industries.”
Jen writes:
“I worked at Restoration Hardware, the signature color that’s everywhere is “Silver Sage.” A customer bought paint and towels for her renovated bathroom. She returned the towels due to ‘spotting’ (likely due to use of a cosmetic product that contained alpha-hydroxy). We exchanged the entire set of towels, explained the washing/care instructions, etc. She returned a week later, same issue. We again replaced the towels, suggesting that perhaps she consider white (the color won’t leach out if she continued to use the alpha-hydroxy product). She said no, the bathroom was already painted and she wanted things to match.
It happened again, and this time she suggested that we pay to have her bathroom repainted in addition to replacing the towels. She also tried to insinuate that we should have been responsible for a traffic ticket she received while making an illegal turn to get to our store.
Unbelieveable.”
Christian writes:
“In the mid 80′s I was a manager at a upper end resort in Maui,Hawaii. One afternoon I was called to the front desk to deal with an irate customer who was checking out. My staff did not give me any other information except this customer demanded to see me and was pissed. When I got there I found a mid- twenties lady crying. Between sobs, where it was two sobs then one word I got a story of we had ruined her whole vacation. That she had saved up three years for this once in a lifetime vacation and we had ruined it. That this was her and her husbands honeymoon trip three years since they were married and that this not only was their late honeymoon but the first vacation they had ever taken.
Now I am concerned that somehow we had ruined her vacation So I ask what did we do? She was still crying and said that since we had ruined her vacation that we should give her a full refund for her entire stay. Again I ask what did we do,please tell me.
She went on again about how she had saved for this for years and how we needed to make up for us ruining it.
Now at this point I have been with her for a good fifteen minutes and have yet to hear what we did wrong. I look over at my front desk staff to get a clue. They have all migrated to the back office area and have left me alone. One more time I ask ‘what have we done?’
She looks at me with tear puffed eyes and tells me that her vacation was ruined as it rained all week. ‘you knew it was going to rain and let us come to Hawaii anyhow. We want our money back because of this.’
At this point I excused myself and went to the back office where I found my staff doubled over in silent laughter. She had asked them first and when they realized that this lady was serious sent for me. I had the power to control the weather and just failed to realize it. I told my crew in a hushed tone as she was right the other side of the desk to please call me God from now on.
I calmly went out and explained to the lady that we at the Sands had as much control over the weather as she had. That even thought I could sympathize with her, this didn’t fall under a reasonable refund request. I did offer her vouchers for a few free nights on her next trip.
Though I have been asked for refunds under many different reasons this has always taken the cake..”
Trying to fix the italics: close
Closed?
CLOSE!
@Rode2008: Why should they worry about someone claiming to have busted their own TV because they put it on the roof?
PS3 dust boy
@Ben Popken: Are we voting? Because I vote for Christian’s story. Demanding compensation for nature can’t be beat.
Regarding the continued italics here, do you know what’s going on? One of the help pages said we should be able to close someone else’s open tags, but my attempts to do so seem to be getting removed when I click “Submit.”
How do I include non-matched tags that don’t get stripped by the Consumerist bots? KJones seems to have done it, but I can’t duplicate it.
@noquarter:
Actually, my own quotes are a mess while others look fine. The messing up of tags may have something to do with being logged in under your own name.
@KJones: If you use Firefox, all the comments after yours are italicized. Using IE, it reports bad HTML. There’s an unclosed tag in your message, and Firefox and IE are handling it differently.
One more try:
Close1
Close2
Close3
Close4
Closed?
I do see where it went wrong for firefox
right before Kjones says “I’m no defender of McRotten’s, but I always found the “too hot” complaints to be beyond ludicrous. Or maybe it’s just my background.”
there’s an ital tag that wasn’t closed –doesn’t have the “>” after the ‘i’ (it was a tag to start italics) before the next tag starts
there was a slash i bracketed later…but I guess firefox didn’t know to deal with the ital tag embedded with a paragraph tag >>>>
@girly: There are a couple of broken tags in that post. What I can’t figure out is how they got there, because every time I try to post a closing one it gets removed somehow
Testing.
@noquarter: When I submitted using IE, it let in unbalanced tags. So I guess FF has some sort of internal check that it does. I assumed it was Consumerist’s JavaScript that did it.
One Green Friday (Toy retailers don’t have Black Friday– it’s to dark. They have Green Friday instead.) I was working as an assistant manager when a man came in with a toy gun wanting a refund because it was broken. He had no packaging or reciept. I didn’t recognize the item and brought in the other assistant manager and the store manager for a second opinion. None of us recognized the item, and it was a brand we didn’t stock. We checked the computer and the home office help desk, and came up no record of the item at all. We searched for it every way we could think of– item number, brand name, item description, and finally just scrolled through everything in the category listing, with no luck (did i mention this was the day after Thanksgiving?). We went back to the customer and told him it wasn’t a toy we carried. The customer became furious, said he was certain he bought the toy from us, paid cash, and if we didn’t give him cash back he was never going to shop with us again. When we said we couldn’t give cash back without a receipt and couldn’t even do a store credit since we couldn’t identify the item, he said we were all lying, shoved the toy at the store manager, and stormed out.
A few hours later on my break I was goofing around in the back room, playing with the broken toy gun, and just for the heck of it I replaced the batteries….
@KogeLiz: What’s funny about that Mellow Mushroom is that one of the original founders/owners is/was very active in Scouting. Back in my teenage years I worked at a scout camp in Georgia and the Explorer post he was assocaited with stayed a week there. One evening the staff was treated to Mellow Mushroom pizza and we all got a very unique t-shirt he had made up just for the staff. I still have that shirt till this day. So much for them not being “family friendly”.
I started at Barnes & Noble just before the holiday rush. On my third day there, I was with one customer when I was approached by another one, a thirtyish man. When I told him I could help him as soon as I finished helping the first customer, OR he could go to the Customer Service Desk and wait for the next available bookseller, he (I kid you not) stamped his foot and said “But I need help NOW!”
You just can’t make this stuff up.
A little late chimming in here but when I worked at Comcast I had an eldery woman call and tell me that just 5 mins ago there was a number on the screen on channel 74 and she needed that number. I asked if this was a Comcast number and she said no, if was for something else and she needed the number. I told her we do not know everything that was on TV and could not get the number since it was for another company. She went off, started asking for a sorts of managers.
Another site to check is [www.planetfeedback.com]
People write & sometimes share their complaint letters, and it’s about a 50/50 split between reasonable complaints and requests and insane people who want thousands of dollars because the cashier at Wendy’s might have looked at them the wrong way.
I used to work for a major phone company. I have tons of stories about stupid customers, husbands calling 900 sex line numbers and the wife finding it on the bill. The one that is the worst was the guy who called up and couldnt verify his account – he wasn’t listed on it, didn’t know the password so i told him couldnt help him. He yelled and screamed for a while and then said ‘i hope someone in your family dies!!’.
asshole!!!
I was waiting on a very drunk man once – who actually wasn’t even my table. His waitress had disappeared.
His steak wasn’t “well-done enough”, and actually ended up trying to stab me in the face with a steak knife, as well as leaving bruises on my arm. Turns out his waitress was crying in the back room because he’d tried to hit her.
When told (we’d been trying to find our manager all night), our manager apologized TO HIM, offered to comp his meal, and buy him another drink. I quit on the spot.
I also remember working in a grocery store as a teen. I was cashiering for a very rich (looking) woman who took her bags, started to leave… and turned around.
She looked straight at me and said “If you (ethnic group) would just not sleep around and have a million babies or get in a gang, and get an actual education, you wouldn’t end up in a pathetic job like this or draining Welfare.”
Every other nearby customer heard that. And what’s REALLY funny is that there is no way in the world that anyone could mistake me for anything but what I am – a very pasty white girl.
Oh, I guess I should contribute some stories of my own.
Working as a dispatcher at AAA Washington/Inland: Our service area included most of the populated islands including those in the San Juans. Got a call from a member at Friday Harbor (on San Juan Island) needing a tow to Anacortes (on the mainland).
Normally not an issue, except this came in at 11pm on a Sunday night, after the ferries had stopped running. Furthermore, the sole contractor on the island towed someone to Anacortes earlier, then had equipment problems that caused him to miss the last ferry home so the earliest anyone could come to pick up that car was going to be around 8am on Monday.
The island-dwellers are typically sane and reasonable folks, realizing that trying to get a tow truck and broken car to the mainland at 11pm on a Sunday night is impossible without paying big bucks for a private barge (and AAA isn’t going to pay for that) and even if there was one available on such short notice, what would be the point? The mechanic isn’t open until Monday morning. At the most I expected to hear some dissatisfaction at missing the first ferry run on Monday.
I was not prepared for the member to turn into a screaming psychotic, rotating between demands that we get someone out there “right this instant”, death threats, lawsuit threats, and sobbing accusations that we were out to “get her” (she’d been a member for 14 years and the only record I could find was for a jumpstart in downtown Seattle four years previously, so not sure how we registered on the conspiracyometer).
I went through all the motions I could think of: Did she have a medical emergency? No. Was she in an unsafe area and need a police assist? No. Did she need a taxi to pick her up? No, she was three blocks from her house. It took me 20 minutes to get this out of her. There was otherwise no reasoning with her, no way to make her understand that there was absolutely no way she was going to get service until the morning.
She wanted to know if she could use the option where she pays a contractor we don’t work with and then apply for reimbursement. I reminded her that even if she paid another contractor, the ferries were not running until the morning. Wrong approach, back to the litany of screaming/threatening/sobbing. 45 minutes later I told her we would see her in the morning and hung up on her.
She called back at least a dozen more times during the night. Since there are only four reps and one dispatcher on the overnight shift, this plan didn’t work as well as expected.
Our contractor finally got out there for the tow on Monday morning, right on schedule. On Monday night I punch in and check work email. Message from the contractor: When she stopped calling us around 4am, she decided to set her car on fire. This led to other service issues that I don’t know much about, other than she finally got escalated to the contact center director who cancelled her membership and gave her a full refund, which meant that either the member requested one or the director reached her limits with the crazy lady.
That entire job was a font of insanity.
I thought I’d read about the vinegar boy thing from here. Unless someone had already posted about it in the comments. It was some crazy stuff.
Too bad I didn’t see this until today!
Here’s my story anyway:
I worked at a call center for hotel reservations. A man called in one night to tell me that his plane had been delayed for the night and he wouldn’t be making it to his hotel. I told him that was no problem, I would cancel his reservation. He then demanded that I get him a room at a hotel in the city he was stuck in FOR FREE! I tried to explain to him that the hotel chain had nothing at all to do with the airline, had no responsibility for his plane delay, and would not be giving him a free room. I told him that the airline should probably do that. He was very upset and continued to insist that the hotel chain owed him a free room.
Honestly, as per our policies, HE owed US. I was being NICE when I canceled his room, because he was way past his cancellation deadline. I have no idea what sort of sense of entitlement could possibly lead someone to think that their cancellation of a reservation with a hotel should earn them a free stay somewhere else.
About a decade ago I worked for Canada’s largest Photo Retailer
It was practice that any 5 or 7day photo development orders would be sent in a daily shipment to head office to be processed by our plant, 1 and 2 days in store.
One afternoon I arrived back from lunch to a shaken co-worker, I asked her what was wrong. She said a man came in demanding his prints but we didn’t have them yet because the Pearson International Airport was shutdown due to a strike and the courier was sending everything back via ground. When she relayed this to the customer he freaked and started swearing and yelling that we get the courier company on the phone and demand immediate delivery, and how could we dare send his pictures out of the store (it’s indicated on the contract and signage.) When she tried to apologize and comp him with free processing included film he demanded to know who took the order, it happened to be me. He then demanded to see me, when she said I wasn’t working today he freaked out and left the store yelling.
We were a little shaken, but stuff like this happens. The next morning I got a call and was told that I was being redirected to a different store temporarily for my own safety. Apparently the customer had been waiting outside the store for the morning shift to open and told the staffer that he was waiting for me to beat the @#$$ out of me for “loosing” his prints. She told him I should be in soon then went to call the police, but in the interim he left the mall.
Two hours later he returned to the store and demanded to see me as he was going to teach me to mess around with his pictures and beat the crap out of me, at which point a police officer (there was a community police station in the mall) came from our lab and arrested him.
While we maintained a “just say yes” policy, offering up employees for assault was thankfully one of the few exceptions.
I also had a customer come in once and demand that we give her 50% off a set of the ugliest frames I have ever seen, which we hadn’t been able to move for over a year and were already marked down 40%. When I refused she left in a huff and returned 20 minutes later when the store was packed, picked up the frames and walked out. My co-worker and I decided just to write off the freaks of nature instead of calling mall security lest we get the hideous beasts back into inventory.