If you've ever worked in the food service industry , you certainly know the pain of customers coming in right minutes before closing. While it's still technically appropriate and enforced by management, the last thing you want after an eight-and-a-half-hour shift is to stick around an extra hour for a couple of customers. If you've never worked in hospitality, it's understandable that you might not understand the common decency of the appropriate window of hours of operation. But my personal be…

Spoiler alert: it's most of them

Karens have been around long before we labeled them as Karens. A lot of boomers don't like the Karen label (usually because they display some Karen tendencies themselves), but boomers can't deny that the term Karen serves a specific and useful linguistic function. There didn't use to be a concise word to describe an entitled, impatient, cruel, boomer white woman who drives everyone up the wall. The absolute worst thing about Karens is the self-centeredness they seem to all possess. They perceiv…

It ain't all glitz and glamor

Behind the scenes

Well, this is awkward.

In the service industry, it's incredibly important to be polite and courteous to your “guests,” but occasionally, a chance presents itself that can't be ignored.

One of the best parts about being a salaried employee is that you don't get called in for random shifts on the weekend. At least I don't, but y'all stay safe out there. There's nothing worse than preparing for a nice long day of doing nothing than receiving a call from your manager. When I worked at a dog bakery, I was always the person saying “yes” to picking up this one girls shifts. If it sounds like I was being a pushover, it's because I was a pushover. For me, it was hard to leave money on…

Don't you just love it when horrible bosses accidentally out themselves by being total a-holes on public forums? When u/ cupofteaf found out that their past workplace had shut down for good, they found some screenshottable gold right up r/ antiwork's alley. It was a negative, one-star review criticizing the restaurant for its bad hygiene practices and poor working conditions. The restaurant owner replied to the review with an angry rant full of empty threats and terrible grammar. Needless to sa…

Some bosses seem to really go out of their way to be complete a-holes. What's the point of cheating an already underpaid employee out of £20? At that point it's not just about money—it's about exploiting your position of power to take advantage of people just because you can, and that's pretty twisted. One redditor recently shared a text exchange between a restaurant owner and his new employee , who had initially messaged him inquiring about missing wages. Keep scrolling to see how the infuriat…

Stupid people are everywhere.

This entitled Karen insisted on ordering a salad. However, the salad she was ordering was, in fact, not a salad. Despite the waiter's attempts to explain this to her, she refused to listen and then proceeded to have a meltdown once her "salad" arrived.

Dealing with Karens while waiting tables has to be one of the worst parts of the job. That's what this server had to endure when a group of Karens came into their restaurant at closing and demanded eggs Benedict without the hollandaise sauce.

Servers are going to another dimension when they walk from your table to the kitchen…

This humble redditor's tale of retail hell has it all—the entitled Karen who makes demands minutes before closing and leaves a nasty review when she doesn't get her way. The unreasonable boss who expects the employee to do the work of ten people but chews them out if they log even 15 minutes of overtime. And the triumphant workers who show their boss the meaning of malicious compliance .

When I was a bartender, customers would often rack up huge tabs over several hours, ordering martinis at the busiest moments and shots for everyone at the bar minutes before closing. The most ostentatious customers were usually the ones who would ditch the bar without closing their tabs, and 90% of the time, those cards would decline. It's a risky scam, but people who work in the service industry know better than most that customers can be shockingly audacious. As much as we wish we could expos…