Why ask questions if you don’t actually care about the answers?
I hate when you get a guest who you can tell from the start is just not listening to you.
This gentleman in a 3 top with his wife and kid asks “what kinds of ice tea do you have?”
“We only have black, unsweetened, ice tea”
Him: “great, I’ll take a raspberry ice tea”
Me: “sorry we only have plain, unsweetened ice tea”
“Okay we’ll ill have an unsweet tea and my wife will have a sweet tea”
I’m a bit annoyed at this point but I’ve dealt with worse so I tell him: “Sir we only have plain, UNSWEETENED tea” Emphasis on the unsweetened part.
Him: “Okay so I’ll take a half and half”
Arnold palmers are pretty popular at my restaurant, so I think that’s what he must mean when he asks for half and half, so I ask: “half tea and half lemonade?
He breathes the biggest sigh in the world because I’m clearly the most incompetent person on the planet and he says “no, a half sweet tea and a half unsweet tea”
I try to tell him again: “sir we only have plain…”
He cuts me off: “fine I’ll have a half “plain” (he was short and sarcastic when he said it) tea and a “plain” sweet tea and I’ll just mix them together myself!”
At this point it wasn’t just the condescension, I was upset at the lack of actual active listening skills and I did kind of just snap “SIR WE DO NOT HAVE SWEET TEA. OUR TEA IS NOT SWEET, IT HAS NO FLAVOR, IT IS JUST PLAIN.BLACK.TEA.”
He looked at me like I just told him the restaurant he was in didn’t carry food. He snapped at me “what do you mean you don’t have sweet tea.”
It took everything in me just to say politely: “we don’t have sweet tea. We don’t have any flavors. Just tea that is not sweet, it is plain tea. It is black tea.” Basically just dumbing down the same sentence I’d been saying for the past 5-10 minutes.
He went on to be a nightmare for the rest of the 45 minutes they were there. I’m just venting and curious if anyone else has been dealing not with “difficult” customers per say, more oblivious people who ask a question without caring about the answer and then getting upset when the answer isn’t what they wanted. I feel like I have been dealing with a different breed the past 2-3 months.