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Danzo

Danzo

KKF Supporting Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2016
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Location
Seattle
Hey fellas. Just curious if anyone else here has to deal with these nut bags in hospitality or retail. Customer service can be great but there are some really... ‘special’ customers out there.

I run a small grocery store in North Seattle, and this nut wants us to stop carrying a popular brand of ice cream because the owner of the company is publicly anti-police during this BLM movement. We try to be nice with her, but if we looked into the politics and ethics of every company we carry we wouldn’t have anything on our shelves. The reality is we are here to sell food regardless is politics. My poor social media manager is having a hell of a time with this broad.

here’s the last email she sent, now she’s threatening to turn us over to the media for carrying said product. lol like any media outlet will give a ****. Here I’m wondering why she isn’t spending her negative energy going straight to the ice cream company. I figured you guys would get a kick out of it.

this is after she sent this customer my phone number.
“Ha! Have no interest in discussing anything with you, Bridget. However,let your "owner" know we'll forward this number to the media outlet we're lining up to do the interview. Again, in case your dense, we have no interest in ever supporting any of the Kens again. We simply feel the neighborhoods needs to know they types of brands you chose to support...especially when they're anti law enforcement. Honestly, since Molly Moons doesn't even make their own ice cream we'd think you'd carry more authentic brands. Snoqulamie makes their ice cream you fools...meaning Molly Moons Ice Cream is a about as self made as an eighty year olds erection, kinda like the owners of Kens...

Thanks, grocery store girl!”

fee free to share your crazy stories with these Karen’s
 
I love Molly Moons! I live down the street from Kens in Queen Anne, go there several times a week. Everyone there is awesome Your customer service is excellent, and has been for twenty years. Even my dog loves kens! What a nut! Redirect her to the Molly moons a few blocks awa!
 
crockerculinary said:
I would just ban them from your business and ignore them. They never never never get any better. They stay crazy. And I don’t care if it’s the French Laundry or a hotdog cart, the moment someone gets abusive they’re gone.
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Oh yeah we’ve banned plenty of people. Typically they are thieves or homeless or mentally ill or a combination of those three. I probably know about 75% of my customers and I’m not exactly sure who this person is. It’s pretty funny how determined she is with this. We’re not too worried about her, she won’t get anywhere with her so called ‘media outlet.’ Especially considering the majority of current political opinions in Seattle are opposite hers.
 
GoodMagic said:
I love Molly Moons! I live down the street from Kens in Queen Anne, go there several times a week. Everyone there is awesome Your customer service is excellent, and has been for twenty years. Even my dog loves kens! What a nut! Redirect her to the Molly moons a few blocks awa!
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that store is actually under different ownership and isn’t part of our kensmarkets. George, Joe, and Eric do a good job with that store though. Still got that old store flair. Too bad this lady is lumping us all together it seems they’ve lost a customer too now.
 
Huh, I consider myself quite good at English, however, what she wrote is at a level where I find it hard to even understand what she means. Could be it would do her good to go back to school :)

On a side note, I hope she does not locate this by google, could get messy.
 
Dhoff said:
Huh, I consider myself quite good at English, however, what she wrote is at a level where I find it hard to even understand what she means. Could be it would do her good to go back to school :)

On a side note, I hope she does not locate this by google, could get messy.
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Her composition and grammar skills are, quite sadly, right on the level of the average american - nothing particularly difficult to understand or follow. I'm not a grammar or spelling nazi so no specific comments about that, but her weakness in basic composition is truly appalling.

Which part did you not understand, so that I can break it down for you?
 
podzap said:
Her composition and grammar skills are, quite sadly, right on the level of the average american - nothing particularly difficult to understand or follow. I'm not a grammar or spelling nazi so no specific comments about that, but her weakness in basic composition is truly appalling.

Which part did you not understand, so that I can break it down for you?
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Think part of the issue is my lack of knowledge of the names, though I had to read it a couple of times to grasp her written language since it is written as one would speak without much regard for the reader :)

“Ha! Have no interest in discussing anything with you, Bridget. However,let your "owner" know we'll forward this number to the media outlet we're lining up to do the interview. Again, in case your dense, we have no interest in ever supporting any of the Kens again. We simply feel the neighborhoods needs to know they types of brands you chose to support...especially when they're anti law enforcement. Honestly, since Molly Moons doesn't even make their own ice cream we'd think you'd carry more authentic brands. Snoqulamie makes their ice cream you fools...meaning Molly Moons Ice Cream is a about as self made as an eighty year olds erection, kinda like the owners of Kens...

Thanks, grocery store girl!”

What is Kens? The shop of Denzo?

Molly Moons is the producer of the product they wish were banned?
 
Years ago, there was a difficult customer at the New Orleans Takeout on Fordham Ave. I chefed at. He would buy a meal and come back the next day, complaining that something had been off, perhaps there had been only one shrimp, no oysters in his gumbo, not the 6 total we always put in every cup. Bread was stale. Rice wasn't cooked enough. Always something wrong. But he kept coming back, apparently trying to find a different person at the counter and wangle a freebie to make up for his "bad meal".

There were only 4 people who ever took front, we all cooked and packed orders too. After a short while, we compared notes.

The next time he came in and started to whine, the owner was front and two of us were at the sandwich board and steam table. The owner who was a Greek dude raised in an NYC restaurant by immigrant parents quickly cut him off and told him to shove it up his ass and get the hell out of his restaurant. The guy acted shocked and said "but the customer is always right!" EVERYONE in the kitchen (3 of us, including the dishwasher), plus the owner and even one of the other regular customers in line turned at once towards the guy and yelled "NOT IN HERE!" We hadn't rehearsed it, it just happened. He didn't come back again.

Life is too short to put up with bad food or bad customers.
 
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Dhoff said:
Think part of the issue is my lack of knowledge of the names, though I had to read it a couple of times to grasp her written language since it is written as one would speak without much regard for the reader :)

“Ha! Have no interest in discussing anything with you, Bridget. However,let your "owner" know we'll forward this number to the media outlet we're lining up to do the interview. Again, in case your dense, we have no interest in ever supporting any of the Kens again. We simply feel the neighborhoods needs to know they types of brands you chose to support...especially when they're anti law enforcement. Honestly, since Molly Moons doesn't even make their own ice cream we'd think you'd carry more authentic brands. Snoqulamie makes their ice cream you fools...meaning Molly Moons Ice Cream is a about as self made as an eighty year olds erection, kinda like the owners of Kens...

Thanks, grocery store girl!”

What is Kens? The shop of Denzo?

Molly Moons is the producer of the product they wish were banned?
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Ken's (sic Kens) is a regional supermarket / grocery store chain. Molly Moon's (sic Molly Moons) is a regional ice-cream brand that apparently sources their product from another manufacturer and white-labels it as their own brand. Yes, from the context that product is the one she wishes was dropped from Ken's inventory.

Snoqualmie (sic Snoqulamie) is the name of one of the local major rivers and also a major mountain pass in the Cascades, and is widely used in regional brand naming.
 
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In case you're dense (sic "in case your dense) means that "in the case that your mind is too feeble to read between the lines".
 
Crazy customers are an all too familiar phenomena. I think food tends to to be an especially popular focus for craziness because it is one thing people more-or-less can control in their lives when so much is out of their control. We had a customer in Maine who insisted we should only stock locally grown produce year round. It apparently never occurred to her that a produce department stocked only, during the winter months, with root vegetables, some rather withered and/or soft apples, and perhaps some stratospherically expensive leafy greens grown in heated and artificially lit enclosures was not a viable proposition. The certified organic wines only crowd was another painful faction, if not so completely insane. Examples of food related craziness abound.
Social media has provided a vehicle for the ignorant and/or mentally unstable to form packs and reinforce one another. It hasn't exactly improved basic civility either.
 
unfortunately social media gives everyone/ anyone their own 'news outlet'.

In the DC area, an IG post went out saying if you simply stayed silent on #BLM, and did not actively post in support of the movement, you (chef) and your restaurant would be added to a compilation of chefs and restaurants to boycott. Within a couple of hours many chafe sand restaurants started posting their support of the movement. Not that many people/ places were not already posting, but there was a very large bump up.

Sadly all it takes is one person with an agenda to cause harm to businesses these days.
 
The common denominator is people and the bell curve.

I have a crew of 8 in the kitchen,, 1 outstanding, 6 good, 1 a pia. (Union Shop - can't get rid of her). Most of my admin time is dealing with the 1. 90% of my call outs are the 1.

I feed about 60 residents, 3 meals/day. About 5 will love anything that gets put on the plate, about 5 will complain about anything that gets put on the plate, we survey as "good" with about 50.

It's true throughout life - there's always an ahole. With social media giving them a largely anonymous platform the aholes are more vocal / visible.
 
That's a great story, thanks for sharing. Not that you need any advice, but if she's ranting while purchasing something, I'd smile, not respond and continue to take her money for the products she is willing to pay for. If, on the other hand, she comes in just to rant, then she's taking up space and I'd ask her to leave and silently pity her for her mis-directed anger.
Now if she had verifiable information that the owners of the company were active pedophiles or something of the sort, then she might be worth paying attention to.
 
@podzap maybe we just could refrain from “an average American “ kind of language. It comes across as insulting pretty quickly ... because it is. And saying that as a foreigner in a US-centric forum does not make the whole situation any better, it actually starts to look like a provocation - irrespective of the original intent.

We all have our views and cliches about different groups of people, but expressing them in such a manner just does not do justice to most. If anyone wants to call me ‘an average Slovakian’ they should feel free to do so, but please use a PM for that.

@Angie I apparently took too long to compose my answer.
 
She appears to be mentally ill. (Diagnosed from afar with nothing resembling professional credentials) She seems like an idiot that really should find something meaningless to occupy her time with... maybe crushing rock salt?

Ban her and be done with it. (I enjoyed reading the thread though!)
 
I never really thought about people as being "foreign" forum members because of server location or what have you. I read your comment as more of a "how dare you," and I'm tired of that very typical American attitude. I am an American, I might add. I'll stop now at the risk of getting political.

I'm more about letting people speak their mind. If they want to generalize, we can come to our own conclusions about them.

@Angie, you are wise not to make such generalizations about "average Russians"-- or perhaps even wiser not to post them online.
 
Generalizations are a good way to upset folks. Even me. And superior tones when they have to explain things for "dense" members. That is even more insulting to any one of any nationality or location.
 
mise_en_place said:
I never really thought about people as being "foreign" forum members because of server location or what have you.
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Same.


mise_en_place said:
I read your comment as more of a "how dare you," and I'm tired of that very typical American attitude. I am an American, I might add. I'll stop now at the risk of getting political.
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I’m not a fan of podzap’s comment either, though. I’m fine saying “how dare you” to someone who says that people from a certain country are stupid.
 
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