Deceptive customer.

A while ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a (lady) on the phone calls up and wants to place a to-go order for a few items, and she requests this one specific fried rice with chicken and shrimp in it and like a tom yum soup mix mixed in as flavoring, but she wants to know if it’s spicy – it isn’t, I explain, just a little bit, but nothing too crazy – and also she then wants the sauce on the side, which I then say I don’t think is possible but I can check, and then she says no, it's okay, you can mix it in.

Then, this (like early 60s) (non-descript) (white) woman shows up, and she opens up the food to look at it when we bring the take-out out, and when we go to ring her up, the price catches her attention, and she suddenly starts asking don’t we sell side orders – we don’t – and then she’s like, “Uh, this rice is too spicy, I told the person who ordered not to order anything spicy for me, but they must have made a mistake…”

At this point, the (Thai) (female) owner with the tired face has happened to step outside towards by us for something else, and everything catches her attention and she talks through the woman’s concerns and she directs her to a standard chicken fried rice for a lesser price, so she orders that instead for her and voids the other fried rice order, and then after she leaves, she starts telling me to move people to that, if they have a concern about spice.

“But she didn’t,” I was like, “She was lying.”

And, I explained that she was the person who ordered over the phone, I recognized her voice, but she must not have liked the price and so she lied in order to make something up and get out of paying for the order.

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was in and out for bits of this, and she later said that I should always say the price at the end of the order, which I agreed with, but I said there were so many clarifications and special requests that I forgot to do it, and besides the difference was just like $2-3 with what she ultimately ended up paying.

“And besides, she has a menu in front of her when she placed the order because she was asking me very specific questions over the phone, how was I supposed to know that she wasn’t looking over at the price for the items that she was asking about?”

“Cheap Chinese food,” my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, solemnly. “She expect cheap Chinese food, and the price surprise her.”