People who work in food service or customer service: What’s the dumbest thing a customer ever insisted was “the law” or “illegal”?
Brought to you by my discovery that some people think that “the customer is always right” isn’t the slogan of a long-dead department store, but rather it’s an actual call the cops law.
We do not have to keep a register open just because there is a customer in the store. We’ve been making closing announcements for almost an hour and the store closed 20 minutes ago. You had more then enough time to buy whatever you wanted. Come back tomorrow.
People not knowing the difference between a cash register and a voting booth kinda makes most election results of the past few decades make a lot more sense though 🤔
Had a similar thing when our internet and phones went out in a retail store. We processed cash transactions for as long as we could before closing a couple hours early. Asshole stuck his foot in the door when the manager was trying to explain why he couldn’t come in, demanding that we let him shop. He was clearly drunk, to boot. Ugh.
I don’t think my customers were dumb but I was regularly accused of breaking the law in a previous job. This was back in 09-10, I worked for a mortgage company in the insurance escrow department processing homeowner insurance claims. The way my job worked: If a homeowner has significant property damage (fire, flood, fallen tree) and the home is under a mortgage, the insurance company will make the check payable to the homeowner and the mortgage company. If it has both names it cannot be cashed unless the mortgage company endorses the check. I was the person responsible for determining if we would sign the back of that check so the customer could cash it.
Mortgages have a clause that allows this, because it’s in the best interest of the mortgage company to make sure the property is returned to the way it was before the claim. If the claim was over a certain amount (I think it was $5k) we required a whole process of holding the money in an escrow account and doling it out in increments using property inspections to verify the work was being completed.
It was honestly a whole annoying process to have to go through, especially if you are already dealing with a traumatic situation that requires the claim in the first place. I got yelled at a lot.
Oftentimes it would start with the customer calling in to figure out why the check was made payable to the mortgage company also. The mortgage company I worked for was part of a large bank, so if the homeowner called the 800 number they were often frustrated by the time they finally found their way to me. Then as I explained that they couldn’t just have the money, we needed them to select a licensed contractor and get our approval, then we would provide 1/3, then we would do an inspection at 50% and release the next 1/3, then a final inspection at 100% and release the remainder. I would get yelled at and told it was illegal. But I would just point them to page 18 section 5 of the mortgage. I could access people’s mortgage docs and I was often asked to send the relevant pages.
Eventually people would accept their fate because they had no choice. I tried to be very sympathetic because it did suck for them. And I had customers tell me a lot of sad stories about fires and floods and tornadoes. It was a super interesting job though. I loved looking at the home inspection reports.
Lots of people buy Emotional Support Animal vests online and think that means they can bring them into restaurants. Nope, FDA is very clear about it: trained service animals only. ESAs actually have almost no special privileges over regular pets. Basically the only exceptions they get are against pet policies/fees on leases.
I watched a guy get kicked out of the Costco food court area because he kept saying his dog was an “licensed” ESA. The Costco manager busted out a little card with the relevant federal laws for a service animal and listed all the rules the dog was breaking by lunging at people, not staying under the table, and barking it’s head off at a real service animal that was just sitting calmly under it’s owners table like nothing was going on around it.
Even if your dog is truly a licensed and trained service animal, but you’ve allowed it to continously break all the rules it’s supposed to follow in a private business. They can still kick you out if your dog doesn’t behave like it’s supposed to be behaving. That’s why it’s a big no no to interact with working animals with their vests on and for owners to let their working animals to break the rules repeatedly by misbehaving and never correcting them.
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