Entitled customers are no foreign concept, especially to teenagers and young adults in the customer service industry. By using real stories from students, and facts found on the internet, this deep-dive into entitled customers will hopefully shed some light on the recurring nightmare that is customer service.

“The other day, a door dasher who had been waiting for a while was yelling at me to get him a specific time when the food would be done… I offered him a seat and a free drink but he just kept complaining about the amount of money he was losing for how long it was taking,” Kylie Bright, a junior who works at Perkins, said, “It was like 20 dollars.”

This phenomena is not simplified to a region, but to the entire country. An article by time.com used a quote by Hans Steiner, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, that said, “People feel almost entitled to be rude to people who are not in a position of power.”

Another story by a student had an interesting note about the so-called “Karens”.

“One day in the middle of a rush, a customer walks in and says she has a pickup order. My manager apologizes because we received the order but never made it, even though it was called in a few hours earlier” Leigha Griffin, a sophomore, said about her job at Goodcents. “We joked about her being a “Karen”, but we had no idea she was an actual Karen. We work overtime to prepare this order and it is done within minutes,” Griffin continues, “While we are preparing this order, the lady brings her husband inside and [they] glare daggers at us. About 45 minutes after they’d left, the lady calls the store and informs us that all her sandwiches were incorrect and wrong.”

Another common incident seen in food service and retail is customers complaining to workers about prices. Now as to why, here’s the long and short of it.

According to hbr.org, “The problem is that while managers can explain the change in carefully thought out values, customers don’t seem to have gotten the memo. They behave as though only one factor matters in the buying decision: price.”

One last story comes from senior Ethan Hunting.

“I had a guy come in with a hoodie that was literally just the Confederate flag and he just acted like a jerk and ranted about politics. Also forced me to bag his groceries in paper. I don’t like him,” Hunting said.

People, especially teenagers, in the work force deserve just as much respect as the rest of society. That’s it.