What’s the ultimate scam? Acting supremely stupid and pretending you don’t know how the world works.
Scammers get pretty creative in this day and age, and it’s not very often that we see an OG classic like the “Gift Card Workaround.” However, if you’ve ever spent a day in the shoes of a customer service employee, either in retail or food service, you’ve seen it all, especially idiotic customers who couldn’t run a scam right even if you handed them the keys to the register vault.
Customer service employees are trained to be good little minions, the face of the company, and the smile customers see when they walk through the door. But as most workers know, the minimum wage paycheck is hardly worth the effort of contorting your smiling muscles into changing your natural expression of boredom, dismay, and genuine dumbfoundedness. Having worked in the food service industry for many years (to be fair, I worked at In-N-Out Burger, which is by far the best fast-food chain to work for), I have gained valuable insights into customer management. It’s tougher than you think to smile and pretend that the customer is always right, because oftentimes, the customer is oh-so-wrong that it tingles in your bones for the rest of your shift, immortalizing their tale on the Customer Wall of Shame in the colleague break room.
An employee in this next story was no stranger to knuckledragging customers. Working for years at the local taco shop, they had seen it all from late-night taquito runs to breakfast burrito hangover cures. However, this particular day, they were far too sharp on their shift to let a pair of scammy hooligans attempt to run their scheme on them. As they whipped out the likes of a brand new, $0 gift card, they hoped to purchase their entire meal and then some, but this clever cashier saw right through their guise, calling them out and forcing them to pay like everybody else.
Because playing dumb can only get you so far in this drive-thru, and you’re going to have to be a little smarter to pull the wool over an experienced customer service person’s eyes.
Author: Kayitsi.com
