I’d sooner chew my pinky finger off than ever work in food service again. I’m dead serious.
Dead. Fucking. Serious.
My first job was in food service so I figured, ok, this is what working is like. Never again.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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For me food service was worse because it was harder to get breaks. In retail I could just tell bad customers "I'll check the warehouse", and then never return. But at the restaurant I couldn't opt out of bad customers.
I bet that the question depends more on management than the customers or type of work.
Like a good manager that doesn't take shit from customers will be way better than the ones that bend over backwards for any complaint.
Same thing for the ones who are chill as long as things are getting done vs the one that is more interested in seeing the illusion of work being done even if things are neglected (because all their attention is making sure people look busy rather than really understanding the work to evaluate results).
You have way more chances to get back at shitty customers doing food service.
Get a cunty customer and you just smile a little too large, be a little too eager to fix their issue and let your eyes glint just a little. Then fix their issue exactly what they asked for with nothing wrong with it and untampered with. When you return to the table put a little too much emphasis on "Enjoy" when you give it to them.
They will spend the entire meal trying to figure out what you did or call the manager over and make a big scene about how you did something but cant point out what. Ruin my night, I'll ruin yours.
Right so in the jumpscare genre you use psychological trick, and in the psych horror genre you use jumpscares on shoplifters and bad customers who can wait an extra minute for their help.
You don’t have to jump out on them, though. One time I had this guy SCREAMING about his order when there was a huge line and he was like #3, yeah? Well he was there for about an hour and while he was ranting at 300Db about how I never do my job yards yadda I had a colleague go get his fridge. He was waiting for that hour impatiently and I kept reassuring my team this would be worth the wait.
Anyhow he goes and gets someone to fetch their supervisor so I walk up once I’d been called.
WHERE IS MY ORDER IVE BEEN HERE FOR 2 HOURS‽‽
sir by my account, you’ve been leaning on it for the last 45 minutes. Your order is already completed in the system and the invoice is printed and on top of the box, do you need help loading it or finding anything else today?
He just screams like Tarzan and starts to push it outside. 5 minutes later quietly shows back up in my now-much-shorter line and sheepishly asks for help loading it.
TLDR: I also like to play ‘ruin my night, I ruin yours.’
I heard some pretty stupid shit working retail.
"Where can I find the crunchy ice cream?"
"Uh... Like, the Nestle Crunch bar ice creams?"
"No, it was just plain vanilla ice cream. But crunchy."
"Do you guys have any sour cream that isn't refrigerated?"
"If this is only 2% milk, what is the other 98%?"
TBH like a half of those questions is something I could ask when I was younger, and the other half might have been asked by my friends when they were high. I hope I didn't upset the retail workers too much...
Its less upsetting and more baffeling
Like I'm not mad, usually confused and intrigued by the question.
Unless you're being a dick about it.
Lemme at the guy about the milk, lemme at him, I wanna explain some shit to that guy, hey guy how much fuckin time you got pal, I wanna tell you about how cows work
I wanna know how cows work
The 2% refers to the amount of fat in the milk. Whole milk is usually something like 3-4%. So 2% milk actually is the "other 98% of the milk" since they skimmed half the fat off. Milkfat is actually not bad for you either*, vitamin d is fat-soluble and taking the extra milkfat out can make it harder for you body to absorb it.
Fat is also flavor, and when it comes to something like yogurt you have to put something else in so it won't taste like shit. That something is usually sugar. For the same flavor yogurt its usually at least double the amount in the fat free variety. And it still tastes like shit if you ask me.
*the dose is the poison, if you eat nothing but cheese you will die of congestive heart failure
IME customers fucking hate it when you infodump on them when they ask questions like this
No, I know how milk works, I wanna know how cows work
Oh, cows are quite simple. They eat silage and turn it into milk, beef, methane, and more cows. Male cows don't produce milk. Steers turn all the silage they eat into beef. Bulls turn 1% of what they eat into cum and the rest is used to produce pure, unadulterated rage.
Aw yeah, that's the stuff
"Do you guys have any sour cream that isn't refrigerated?"
How is that a stupid question?
https://www.finefoodgroup.com/tool/en/products/cheese-and-sour-cream/che/sour-cream-uht/cd04a
Because unless it's a powdered mix thing, sour cream (and almost all dairy) in the US is refrigerated for food safety. They were not looking for a powder or mix.
It's just UHT. UHT dairy is very much legal in the US. And does not have to be refrigerated. It often is, because unrefrigerated milk makes US consumers uneasy. But it doesn't have to be.
I am aware that it's less common than it is in Europe. But it's not an unreasonable question.
Every question is unreasonable if you hate people.
I've done both, and I'd say food service is generally worse. Neither are as bad as being on an assembly line, I can tell you that much.
Now that is shocking to hear. You do not have to deal with the whims of the general public. One would imagine anything would be better.
You still gotta deal with the most absolutely bored co-workers who are so disillusioned they create petty drama to fill their days. The 60 year old lady with a mullet who has been working the job outta high school is going to set an absolutely unmatchable pace for zero reason other than to give their ego a pat on the back, and not give two shits for the problems that pace might create when the shit they send down the line starts to inevitably back up.
All while doing absolutely back breaking and fatigue inducing actions for long periods while operating machinery that will dismember you before you even notice something is wrong. Your mind is so bored by the repetitive tasks it erodes at caution though, so good luck not messing up.
Imagine a never ending machine of molten plastic parts that burn you just a little bit every time you grab one, not enough to be damaging but enough to be uncomfortable, now imagine that machine controls your life for 8 hours with two 15 min breaks and one 30 min break for lunch/dinner.
The machine will speed up when production needs to be up and you have to keep up, you miss two pieces and you are put to the side and someone else will take over, you do it two or three times and you go home without a paycheck.
I'll take a screaming Karen every time over that fucking piece of shit Job
You just reminded me of my short bastard super from one of my old jobs. They put me on the prep deck to get all the wash process water off the parts before they go into the paint booth. One day they bump the line up to something like 14 feet per minute and tell me that I should stop the line if I need more time for quality reasons. So I stop the line. Fucking Mike whips in there with his private forklift and goes "hey why the fucks the line stopped" and hits the go button. A couple back and forths at shift meetings and I give up, because they've got me working 5 or 6 10s and I have lost the ability to give a damn. So now the paint is fouling on every fourth part, and when the facility manager comes round bitching about our reworks guess who gets thrown under the bus?
God I hate manufacturing
I just got out of a plastics welder job for Schutz tanks, "Greek Punishment ass job" is a very accurate descriptor.
I believe Sisiphean is the word
Yeah, but I found their original in the last paragraph funnier. Still misquoted that too though, so fair criticism.
Reminded me of What Remains Of Edith Finch, it has a segment working on a line cutting fish heads off. Grab fish, put in guillotine, cut, next, over and over. The monotony and pointlessness of it, and what it does to the psyche.
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Food service is worse.
So many rules and you're stressed out by management that feels 2 people can run an entire restaurant themselves.
Am in management, let me tell you, we fill out all those positions. My boss returns the schedule to me with 1/3rd the number of people i put on it. It's a nightmare
I’m also in management, and, yeah. Trying to get everything done with such little labour is a nightmare and I end up picking up all the extra work. I don’t want my staff to have to stay late so I do. I’m yet to leave work on time.
Two people? What do you need two people for? You make the food and then you give it to the customer, it's not rocket surgery! Now get to it you lazy bum!
special case, Walmart is Cronenberg levels of body horror.
keep in mind, it gets worse the darker it is outside.
My wife did both in a Californian suburb and this is accurate in that retail will make you lose faith in humanity while waiting tables is actually kinda fun but very tiring.
In her case, it wasn't the Karens but rather the amount of terrible parenting she would witness. One kid shamelessly stole thousands of dollars of Pokemon cards, get caught, and the mother took his side and blamed the store (?!). Plus, so many kids just left there like it's a fucking daycare, too. Touching and messing up stuff. My wife was working alone most of the time, too!
Not to mention, no chair, no real breaks, minimum pay, and so on. At least with food service, good places have tips and you get to bring home food. If you sell alcohol, it's extremely lucrative in states that don't dock your pay. An occasional jump scare is worth making more than an average college grad, and one of her friends opened a sushi place and gives us a discount. Food service is cool.
Corporate retail was worse. I had like 30 minutes of assigned work a day, and for the other 7.5 hours I had to pretend to be busy. It was awful.
I did get really good at balancing stuff on my fingertips, though. And I had the location and price of every item in the store memorized.
Food service was harder work, but shifts went by much faster. I mostly washed dishes and did prep, but subbed for wait staff when needed, and all of it was better than retail. Plus, everyone was high or drunk and management didn't give a shit.
Why was downtime at the retail gig so bad? Couldn’t you just doodle or mess around on your phone? Seems like you could come up with a creative way to appear busy.
Nope, you had to appear to be busy doing retail like things. Mostly that involved doing the assigned work for others and fronting (straightening up rows of products and bringing them to the front of The shelf).
I wasn't even allowed to wander around looking for customers to help.
When I worked in retail, you were not allowed to be on your phone or even sit, even if the store was completely empty. You were expected to pretty much stare at the door and manifest customers.
If there's time to lean, there's time to clean! /S
It has been 17 fucking years since i worked fast food and even just reading this phrase still makes me scream internally every time
Can confirm, also partially explains my taste in art
Walmart gave me constant illness and depression, fast food has just given me grey hairs and chest pain
Personally I found food service to be much worse.
For me retail was terrible, fast food was a special type of hell. But working as a busser was far and away the worst and strangest work experience I've ever had
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