A Karen calls an arts and crafts store and demands a pizza… No, this isn't a punchline for a joke—but everyone who has worked in restaurants or retail wishes that it was. These workers have seen their fair share of wild demands and demanding wild persons—and it only takes one screaming customer meltdown in the lobby of your establishment to make you reconsider your entire line of work. But at least in person, most people have the good graces to behave politely, but phone conversations and email…

It's easy to get lost in a fantasy about putting an entitled person in their place—though the perfect response usually doesn't come to you in the moment, but rather when you're in the shower sometime later. There, in a dream daze fueled by hot-running water, your wits are sharpened to a knife's edge, and the resulting clarity brings forth the cutting remark you wish you'd thought of earlier. Seldom do you get the chance to live this fantasy out and take your adversary to task—but this guy claim…

It turns out we might not be very good at doing a job that isn't actually ours, and that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, except to people like this Karen who refuse to listen to you when you tell them that you don't actually work there. Sure, we've all probably mistaken a complete stranger for an employee of the establishment we're patronizing, but continuing to insist that they must work there and are doing their job poorly after being corrected is downright insane. This college student…

It should be understood, at this point, that straying into a store with a uniform consisting solely of a specifically colored shirt—whilst wearing that same color of shirt—is a risky move. It should also be understood that even wearing a similar color shirt is likely to attract every Karen and disgruntled manager within a 100-meter radius. If you choose to do this, you do so at your own peril, but at least you can write a story about it later to share online. This guy happened to stray into a l…

Getting fired from a job where you didn't work is a bit like losing a race you weren't entered into in the first place; it's really hard to be upset about it when you didn't even know you had something at stake. This customer shared their story of witnessing another fellow customer ending up on the wrong end of a stray Karen's fury when they visited a “Wall of Marts” during a trip to the United States. They share their surprise at realizing that the people they had read about in “People of Wall…

It's often said that we should seek to better the world by helping those around us, but what if those people needing help are demanding help and being incredibly rude about it? Better to let the world burn if that's how it's going to be. There's no shortage of entitled people who have a 6th sense for the goodwill of others and look to latch onto that goodwill-doer like a leech and absorb all of the goodwill that is to be had. This student was helping a retired teacher from their school when the…

There are a lot of challenging things about working retail, but by far, the most challenging is dealing with entitled customers. It never ceases to amaze, the types of people you encounter when working these jobs. The very idea of receiving the most base levels of “service” gets some people foaming at the mouth as they rabidly seek to wield the most assuredly strained semblance of power. This lust is blinding, and soon they turn to

It really is a shame that our society has turned into one where helping others is associated with being in a lower class. The number of stories where someone is rudely addressed by another customer and assumed to be a worker just because they went out of their way to help or be pleasant to someone is astounding. In each of these scenarios, even the most basic acknowledgment that the person working is a human being immediately marks them as a recipient of rude demands. This story, shared by Redd…

Once upon a time, my second job ever was as a merchandizer (vendor) for an unnamed beer company TM . At the ripe age of eighteen, I'd travel around from site to site in a barely functioning van, ensuring that our product was better stocked and more nicely presented than our competitors. I was somebody finally doing something on my own without an adult breathing down my neck and, with a fairly rural route, I spent a significant chunk of time driving and reflecting on whatever thoughts an eightee…

Mistaking another customer for a worker can be an embarrassing, humbling experience… but not if you're so entitled that you are completely incapable of realizing you've made a mistake. In a thread posted to Reddit's r/IDontWorkHereLady subreddit community by Redditor u/Tactical-Pixie-1864, the original poster shared their tale of being accosted by a wild Karen when they were trying to pick up dinner after a shift. They worked as an EMT and were already at the frayed ends of sanity after their s…

Getting contacted by an old workplace is a lot like running into an ex-lover. There's all this history of shared trauma and buried emotions of all sorts on either side. You had so much intimate knowledge of them once, but now they're a complete stranger. There might be some longing and regret but, deep down, you know it's better that you went your separate ways. This Redditor, u/AcrolloPeed, shared their story of an experience like this to Reddit's r/IDontWorkHereLady subreddit community. The c…

Mistaking another customer for a worker is always a disastrous experience: You're embarrassed that you made a mistake, and they're confronted by the fact that someone thinks they look like a “lowly” retail worker. Depending on how much of a jerk the not-retail-worker customer actually is, they may just brush it off and leave you to stew in your embarrassment. Still, there's also the chance they explosively take offense to the situation. When this happened to this blind customer, who had mistake…

“You don't always get what you want,” the singer Mick Jagger once famously sang; it's a statement that reminds us that there really is more to life than coveted goods and materialistic desires — and is especially pertinent if what you want is a pizza from a place that doesn't even make pizza.

Think about how much money you could make from selling "I Don't Work Here Lady" shirts!

Accidentally approaching a stranger in a store, assuming that they work there — we've all done it — but it's how you handle those next embarrassing seconds that define your true character. Sure, most of us are most likely to blush and mumble some apology under our breath as we carefully back away and retreat to die in a hole somewhere; the bolder among us are going to be more like to laugh at ourselves for our mistakenness. But, there's a third group of people out there: Those who are so stubbo…

Working as a delivery driver can be a hell of an experience. Consistently driving around and interacting with people on the threshold of their homes exposes you to a lot of experiences you'd probably rather not have witnessed; there's a reason why there's no shortage of crazy stories from delivery drivers floating around the wider web. People are strange, that's just a fact, and the more of them you interact with in a day, the more likely you are to encounter someone in uncomfortably close prox…