Tales Of Consumers Making Outrageous Requests
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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check out customers_suck on livejournal... so many sucky customers...
I wanted to leave a "Best" Buy without submitting to a command requiring I put my property on the floor and dig a receipt out of my wallet in front of a group of strangers - that's pretty unreasonable, huh? ;)
Check out CustomersSuck . com Some good tales there and some bitching and whining too. My personal favorite is Vinegar Boy (Under Sucky Customers / Classics) 2nd page.
How about when someone who made $14,000 a year starts to complain that he can no longer afford his $720,000 home?
What about celebrities who close down stores so they can browse 'in peace?'
Customerssuck is great but there's so much, I'll look up vinegar boy but post direct links if you can.
Maybe there are so few examples because customers are usually not the crazy ones...
A 50 year women screaming at employee in gift card shop, because the employee refused to accept a student rebate card, which gives 15% off. (By the way, on rebate card, it's written that a piece of student id is required to get the rebate).
The women completed by saying to the student employee : "You'll work for minimum wage all your life!".
The kick : rebate card wasn't even activated (like a gift card, if you steal it, you get nothing:)
Women stormed out of the store. Bad customer ot lousy criminal ?
Off the top of my head:
Woman who got kicked off of SWA flight for not wearing undergarments, then cried all the way to the Today Show [www.nbc4.com]
Woman who sues BestBuy for $54MM over lost laptop [www.informationweek.com]
@girly: If they spend enough money, then it's ok. It's like gift shops who arrange ''wedding days'', where families shop for someones wedding. Shop is closed to all customers, but these with an invitation. Still, the owner turns a very good profit.
What about the "Southwest was mean to us because we were too pretty" girls. Does that count as an unreasonable request?
Talk to anyone at a restaurant. Frequent topic on washington post's food chat is how ridiculous diners are and how they want to be comped for every minor thing. Last night I watched a lady go ballistic because her salad dressing wasn't on the side. THey brought her a new one and she went apeshit when the bill came because they charged her for it.
A woman having not one, but two managers called to complain about me because I made her a cappuccino that wasn't to her satisfaction and (while I did offer to replace it with what she wanted at no cost) refused to acknowledge that cappuccinos were supposed to contain regular drip coffee in addition to espresso. She kept shouting about how it was "ridiculous", and when the managers backed me up, asked for the 800-number to further the complaint. She verbally harassed me in front of a line of customers for about fifteen minutes, and eventually had to be asked to leave the store.
Oh! Or the guy who would follow customers around Borders and touch himself, but claimed that since it was through his clothes we couldn't ask him to stop.
Don't forget the Home Depot "make up my own receipt with filth on it to get on the Consumerist and impress everyone" guy.
There was also a woman once who brought her dogs up to the second floor (where both the cafe and the pets section are idiotically located), and I was designated to let her know that the health department required no pets being allowed on the same floor as where food was being served. She didn't respond, just stared at me far longer than was comfortable while I stood there awkwardly. When I repeated the request to take her pets to another floor, she verrrry slooooooowly put her book back; her dog tried to sniff me, and she yanked him back. She then verrrrry slooooowly walked to the elevator, so she could go downstairs and complain about the "rude cafe worker" who "asked [her] to leave for no reason".
This wasn't an isolated incident, but a customer at Borders once asked me to help her find a book. When pressed for details she said that it was "green", and "about this big".
We also frequently had people come in looking for something that was published in the NYT book review, sometimes as far back as a year prior to the current date; they would become extremely agitated when we couldn't determine what the book was based solely on that criteria. Those were the same people who would ask to speak to a manager and complain about the untrained (one guy actually said "stupid") staff who couldn't provide a detailed synopsis of every book he had chosen.
The two women who complained they were treated poorly by flight attendants, because they were good looking (on Consumerist).
Retail Renting (as described on this site) certainly deserves a mention, it's an entire mindset of entitlement that most will find outrageous
The classic is of course the spilled McDonalds hot coffee incident of years back.
Soup Nazi?
Can't wait to read the article Ben!
@Ben Popken: In case you're wondering, I'm betting the kid drank the Malt Vineger because he thought that it was like Malt Liquor.
Only one I can think of right now is the lady who sued best buy for losing her laptop for $50 mil or something around there.
uhh, ben...
+ Watch video
editor of popular consumer watchdog blog asked to write about naggy consumers? careful now.
I am sure that everyone's aware that an article "well crafted" by the Reader's Digest editor's could do a lot of damage to all the progress we've made in consumer rights. So my comment is to be choosy and make the story submission's about truly absurd consumers and not the ones who are so frustrated that they exploded without knowing there are people (like us) with well polished practices that get better results.
While working customer service for Earthlink (before they laid us all off and out-sourced), I remember a call from a customer that was demanding we refund him over $500.00 in long distance fees. I explained to him that since we were not the telephone company, and did not make those charges, we could not 'refund' them. Furthermore, he had stated that the number had been guranteed as local by the previous rep he had spoken to, and his propriatary ELNK browser had verified it was local. Interestingly enough we had a police of telling people that since we are NOT a telco, we can't say for sure that a given number will be a local call or not and it should be verified with the actual telco. He said that he was not warned of this. The notes on his account differed. I asked if he used the ELNK email address associated with his account. He said he did. I then told him that the previous rep's notes stated that he was told about this potential issue, and that they also show an automated entry stating that the rep had sent his ELNK mailbox a message reiterating this policy and what procedures he should take. He said he never recieved it. I then informed him that ELNK's propritary browser forced you to acknowledge an identical message as the email when adding a new number (even the first time). Unfazed by this "BS" he demanded a supervisor. Eventually he was escalated all the way to a director who offered to split the difference with him as a credit on his ELNK account.
The kicker; he called back two days later to close the account, and it all started over again when he was told we swould not be "cutting him a check" for the credit.
When I worked as customer service for a local land-line provider, a guy called screaming saying that the bill was way too much to pay, and that usually he paid a lot less. After 5 minutes trying to figure out who the customer was, it turned out he was calling about his ELECTRIC heating bill.
When I politely told his that he is calling a phone company, not his electricity provider, the guy continued to scream that I should transfer him to them. Urhg, I don't even know the phone number of this company.
Then the weirdo hand up, and I'm wondering, the phone t o call customer service is on the electricity bill, how can you make a mistake and call a totally different company?
The bank robber dressed as a tree certainly falls in the bad consumer category.
More appropriately..the guy who tried to buy a plasma TV for $4.88 - [consumerist.com]
Some of us actually have completed degrees in midlife so how do you know the 50 yr old wasn't a student?
@chouchou:
@SkokieGuy: not to open a can of worms, but the McDonalds thing isn't nearly as ridiculous as people make it out to be.
Those damn consumers that demand that they get what they actually paid for, and get treated well? The nerve....
I used to work in retail, and we had some great stories. One jerk tried to return a non-returnable item, then got mad and hit the manager with it. Luckily, it wasn't heavy. He flipped her the bird and told her to "F*** Off" several times.
One guy tried to return an item that was 18 MONTHS old, with no receipt and no extended warranty. When the manager told him to go, he threw it down and left.
Also, there were several people who would curse and yell at me if a price rung up 50 cents higher than the sticker. One even called me an M.F.
I just got through all 7 pages of vinegar boy. Awesome.
Sorry Ben. got nothing for you, just wanted to chime in on th vinegar boy.
@girly: no, no...you see crazy customers everyday and you don't know it. Having worked with the general public for nigh 15 years, and I can tell you we are all crazy at some point.
I recall a story about a sales clerk at Macy's (then Hudson's) that got a bit of a beating for rolling her eyes at a customer. But I don't think the customer made an unreasonable request, they just had a crazy reaction to the clerk's unprofessional behavior.
@bonzombiekitty: Since Ben himself has had that argument with someone I doubt that one will get submitted by Consumerist.
When I worked for GameStop, many years ago. A woman wanted to return her opened XBOX for cash back.
I explained to her that we could only replace it with the same item, unless it was defective and no more were in stock, at which point we would issue a store credit.
She then preceded to remove the XBOX from it's box and smash it onto the tile floor. She was very pleased with herself when she proclaimed, "It's defective now!"
I used to work for a small, independent bookstore (now defunct). On Christmas, an elderly woman came in looking for a gift, and after following her around the store for a half hour, she finally decided on a coffee table book-sized atlas, one of those from National Geographic that's got a lot of photos. On the cover was a big gold sticker proclaiming "NOW MORE COLOR" or "NOW INCLUDES ALBANIA" or something. She was very insistent that because it was a gift, the sticker had to be removed. But, we pointed out to her, it'd been put there by the publisher, it didn't have a price or anything on it; but no, she wanted it gone. My manager spent a good 45 minutes trying to get it off, using Goo Gone, lighter fluid...you name it, he tried it, but by golly, he got it off. He pushed it across the service counter to the lady, and the woman immediately demanded a discount off the book because "we ruined the cover."
Or the woman who, on a Sunday night before we closed, bought a $70 atlas because it was the only thing we had in the store that had two pages of information about some obscure African nation her son was doing a report on. And yes, the report was due Monday. And yes, she returned the book Monday night.
@girly: oh and BTW, I would be too afraid to work with the general public. The potential for violence is too scary.
How about expecting a pleasant, competent shopping experience at Mal-Wart, Circuit Shitty, or Worst Buy?
I was reminded of this one in the Comcastmustdie thread here this afternoon:
The story of Gina Coleman, a woman who battled Comcast for a long long time to get money refunded to her, and just when Comcast finally capitulated and agreed to give her the refund, Gina ups the ante and demands free cable from them as a condition of accepting her own money back.
My head is still spinning over that one, and it provoked a great deal of emotional followups from two camps:
A) Gina was crazy for screwing her own refund;
or
A) The people in Group A who say Gina was crazy are card-carrying communist Comcast flunkies!
(I participated in Group A as a good Consumerist, and was heartily accused of being a Comcast shill, thank you.)
years ago while filling in as a cashier I had one lady go crazy because I placed two 64 oz cartons of juice in a single plastic bag (our bags hold 15lbs easily - this is only 8lbs)
So I took out the one container and then placed each in a seperate bag with some other stuff.
Nope still not happy- long story short the solution to her satisfaction was 1 64oz juice container per 2 plastic bags inside of each other. For a 40.00 dollar order maybe 20 items tops I used almost 20 bags - yeah almost 1 bag per item.
What about that lady that opened the pickles (i think) and then pretended to slip and fall in the grocery store? I think I read that one on here.
I worked at a video game store a long time ago, and one day a woman barged in because her kid didn't like the games she had bought him for Christmas the week before and he traded them in. She accused us of "ripping off" the kid because the trade-in value wasn't as much as she'd paid and demanded that we give back whatever he had traded in. Of course, when we couldn't find the original games (somebody had probably already bought them), the mom called the police. I laughed, but the store manager freaked out and gave her some money, after which she smugly called the police station back and told them they didn't need to come anymore.
I also had a friend once who worked at a bakery in a grocery store and someone tried to get a refund for a cake they'd already eaten. Of course, the manager caved there too.
*puts some popcorn in the microwave and sits back to enjoy the carnage*