Even before anyone used the name “Karen” to describe this behavior, it’s more or less impossible to work in retail without seeing it.
And even if you haven’t, there’s a chance you’ve seen a customer who fits the description make a scene in a store at the some point. Even if they’re not actually throwing a public tantrum , you can usually spot them by their tendency to make unreasonable demands of front-line employees and immediately try to escalate matters to the manager when they don’t get their way.
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But while these customers can be annoying to their fellow patrons, they’re nightmarish to whatever employee is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of their abuse. And one customer who was very aware of this found a clever way to do something about it.
Due to a recent rise in gas prices, the customer we’re about to hear from encountered a lot of crowds and tension in the air when they went to a Costco gas station.
And as this person wrote in a Reddit post , employees at these gas stations are required to periodically sweep up lanes in front of pumps to clean up spilled gas.
In order to do this, they have to close that lane and direct customers elsewhere.
However, this process clearly wasn’t to one customer’s satisfaction.
Although there were cones set up around the lane that employees were clearly sweeping, one woman simply drove around them and tried to get gas from the closed pump anyway.
This led an employee to tell her the lane was closed and direct her to a free one, which apparently compelled her to say, “You don’t have to talk to me that way!”
As the customer described it, the employee’s tone was no less polite than if he had told her something she wanted to hear.
But as the employee pointed out the cones and the brooms while trying to explain why the lane was closed, the woman he was dealing with only got angrier.
While her passenger flipped the employee off, she starts in on an expletive-filled rant about how she felt she was being treated.
She then told him, “Your manager is going to hear about this, you just lost your job” before speeding away.
But before she could call in to complain, the customer watching this situation made a call of their own.
After googling the store’s phone number, they found the line to talk to a manager.
And it wasn’t long for they told the person they got in touch with the following:
“In a minute you’re going to get a call from a lady claiming she was just disrespected by a gas employee and complaining a storm. Let me tell you what actually happened from an objective observer because no way this guy did anything wrong and it’s going to come down to his word versus crazy lady.”
And while the manager was happy to hear the customer clear things up and let them know the employee was doing as directed, it seems that this report came in not a moment too soon.
Because right after they finished their story, this manager told them another manager had just picked up a call from that very “Karen.”
Won’t she be in for a surprise?
h/t: Reddit | TanakaKamatari
