Karen customer tries to score free meal from restaurant for third time a row, manager teaches her unforgettable lesson

Author image for Sienna Varady
Sienna Varady
Jul 25, 2024 6:00 PM EDT

Jobs in customer service are never simple. Yet the task is made even harder when a client is trying to take advantage of you in order to earn a fast profit. An employee of customer service recounts his frustrations in the story below.

The original poster (OP) has a long history of employment in the hospitality sector. Therefore, he acquired the ability to interact with an extensive selection of people. But after a particularly entitled customer sought a free supper for the third time in a row, OP understood he needed to take action in order to prevent this from happening a fourth time around.

So, make sure to read the story below if you're interested in learning more about what happened and how the customer attempted to trick the waiters of the restaurant into giving her a full reimbursement for her meal! After you're done, don't forget to read the story of the manager who, in an attempt to increase sales, cancels the company's social benefit—only for the staff to outwit him in his own game! It makes for some lighthearted entertainment in between your afternoon meetings!

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  • 01
    "It's her..."
    via canva
  • 02
    The free ride is over.
    via u/radialomens
  • 03
    I got a phone call today from a woman who said that she had placed an online order for pickup, but when she got home she found a hair in her food. I'm a manager, so I have permissions to issue refunds and I refunded her for both the entree and the appetizer as an apology for the inconvenience -- her entire order, free.
    via u/radialomens
  • 04
    But honestly.... this rang a bell. I had refunded this order for this person for this reason. So I went into the office to look through months of transactions and I searched for the last time that appetizer had been refunded. Sure enough: Same name, same card. Same phone number... kind of?
    via u/radialomens
  • 05
    See, I don't know why, but she entered a different phone number with her online order both times. Completely made up, say one was 602-7473, the other was 206-7374. Her real number, according to the caller ID, was 602- 7374. (Obviously, that not her real number, those are just made-up digits). As an aside, anyone got an idea why she did that?
    via u/radialomens
  • 06
    Anyway, now I had her card number and the name on the card so I kept looking. Back to 2022. I found a third refund she received in August 2023 for, yes, a hair in her food. Other than that, there were only two more orders she had placed (both 2023) that she didn't receive refunds for until she found the password for free food.
    via u/radialomens
  • 07
    Clearly, we have been putting hair in this woman's food with increasing frequency, but out of the kindness of her heart she comes back every couple of months to give us another chance. Miss J.R., when you order again I'm going to recognize the order, I'm going to recognize the name. And I guarantee you there will not be hair in your food for a fourth time. I'm an a le, I'm here 50 hours a week, and I have the time.
    via u/radialomens
  • 08
    UPDATE: ONE DAY LATER Got an update for you MUCH quicker than I expected, and it's not.... quite the satisfying outcome that many of you were looking for. It doesn't involve even a single , sad to say. First, a couple things to clarify: I couldn't really refuse to take her order or block her, because she was just ordering through our website. She doesn't have an account I can ban, and FOH eyes won't see the order until we start packing it.
    via u/radialomens
  • 09
    So today, when the hosts came in I told them all about JR, her order, her tricky phone number, etc. Told them I want her to be infamous so that when she pulls this again months from now we all remember her. Around 6:30 one of the hosts tells me, "It's her." JR apparently called in because yesterday's refund hasn't processed yet and she wants to
    via u/radialomens
  • 10
    make sure she's getting it. It was the height of the dinner rush so the host took down her name and number, obviously realizing who this was in the process, for me to call her back later. Now, the refund already went through on our end -- I had done that last night before I even got off the phone with her the first time, when I didn't know for sure that my hunch was right. I can only guess that because that was a Sunday, the banks were a day behind.
    via u/radialomens
  • 11
    But now I had the option to follow up with JR. I waited until the rush d down and I had a little time on my hands. Knowing corporate, they wouldn't want me to make a direct accusation, best I could hope for was to let her know that I'm aware of the scheme and expect that to deter her from trying again.
    via u/radialomens
  • 12
    So I called her, but it went to voicemail, which kinda threw me off because I was prepared for a confrontation. I don't remember what I said verbatim. I started by calling her by her last name, which she had never provided but I of course got from her card. I told her that we've already refunded her for yesterday's meal and
    via u/radialomens
  • 13
    she should see the money soon, and that I looked into her order history and I thought that it was strange that even though she's only ordered from us five times, that she's called back to say there was a hair three of those times. I said that was highly unusual but that we'll be on the look out if she orders from us again in the future, and that I promise her there will not be a fourth incident.
    via u/radialomens
  • 14
    And uh... that's it, lol. After I hung up I wished that I had said I would update her phone number on our end (which you can guess is a complete lie because we don't have orders listed by the phone number associated, as you all could probably tell by me not immediately understanding why she kept switching it up). Something else to kinda mess with her.
    via u/radialomens
  • 15
    Hopefully it's enough to scare her off. But there's a chance yet that she might try again in which case I'll post here. If she really has the gall, she might call back tomorrow when the GM is in but I'm off (it's my weekend now) and complain about the voicemail I left her.
    via u/radialomens
  • 16
    moose_nd_squirrel When I worked in a pizzeria we had a lady that kept claiming she found hair in her food. Unrelated, but the line had all shaved their heads for one of our servers battling cancer and she happened to come in within a few days of the mass shaving. She tried to
    via u/moose_nd_squirrel
  • 17
    pull the same stunt so chef had us take our hats off and marched the entire line with bald heads out to her table to ask her who's hair color it matched. She sputtered for like 5 minutes while the whole restaurant stared at her until she finally admitted it must've come from her own head. She never came back Imao
    via u/moose_nd_squirrel
  • 18
    GoatCovfefe Update us!
    via u/GoatCovfefe
  • 19
    radialomens OP Will do! Based on the pace at which she returns to us it'll probably be November before then. Which honestly -- if you're going to pull this stunt, obviously you don't want to also be a recognizable regular, I get that. She probably cycles from place to place before she starts over.
    via u/radialomens
  • 20
    LeastAd9721 Totally had something like this happen myself. Party of 7. Wanted to sit on the patio during Sunday brunch. They did have a new server who honestly wasn't that good, but at the end of their meal suddenly like three people had their orders wrong, and one guy found a hair in his food and ate around it. I discounted/comped some
    via u/LeastAd9721
  • 21
    things on their check, then it clicked that I had seen them before and they pulled the same stunt on a different manager when they were like "Oh, and we're military." I wish they would have come back before I quit. ETA: The phone number being different is probably because a lot of the software systems out there will pull up a customer's record by looking up their phone number.
    via u/LeastAd9721
  • 22
    GingerSnapped818 I waited on a woman who claimed hair in her food and it was clearly her own and placed right on top of her food. Of course my spineless manager comped a bunch of things. TWO WEEKS LATER they were in my section again and guess what???? She did it again!! I said not this time, honey. No tip, obviously, but I never saw them again
    via u/GingerSnapped818
  • 23
    Alive-Wall9274 Sounds like a great scam. Wonder where else she does this.
    via u/Alive-Wall9274
  • 24
    xmadjesterx We used to put notes into the system for "difficult" guests. If they made an online reservation or used the same phone number when they would call to make one; we had information from their last visit and would plan accordingly
    via u/xmadjesterx

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customer service workplace-stories work stories entitlement server waiter coworkers restaurant entitled customers entitled people karma entitled karen karma Reddit restaurant work entitled people
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