People who work in a customer facing environment are, unfortunately, often used to dealing with the absolutely worst customers out there. Add alcohol to the mix and you truly have a horrible entitlement cocktail. But once you mix in a Karen and her adult children, the whole experience becomes almost farcical.
A bartender shared her experience with the “Karen” mother of a particularly drunk man, who had taken offense that she refused to keep serving him. We reached out to the bartender in the story via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.
Anyone who has worked in customer service has encountered the dreaded “Karen”
Image credits: ELEVATE / pexels (not the actual photo)
But one bartender had the bizarre experience of a Karen who was making demands for her drunk son
Image credits: Tima Miroshnichenko / pexels (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Unable-Anxiety5772
Every retail or food service worker has probably encountered the infamous “Karen”
Image credits: cottonbro studio / pexels (not the actual photo)
For those of you who are, perhaps, blissfully unaware, a “Karen” is a person, typically someone middle class with a serious attitude. They can normally be found (like in this story) harassing a service worker with demands, opinions and requests for a manager. This tends to be followed by statements like “do you know who I am?” or strange references to important connections this person supposedly has.
This sort of entitled customer insists that they are simply always right and will berate the employee until they summon a manager. After all, they are 100% right and a higher-up will see it immediately. When this, inevitably, does not work out, they will turn to “invoking” corporate or really whatever higher up authority will fix their issue.
Generally, this does not work and is a waste of everyone’s time. After all, why would an employee try a little extra to solve the issue of someone who is just downright rude and horrible? However, none of these facts have seemed to be effective at getting “Karens” to perhaps lose a tad of their unearned entitlement and to be a bit nicer. Some entitlement can be chalked up to poor communication, but this is rarely the case when it comes to just doing business.
Some “Karen’s” stand head and shoulders above the rest
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While generally, a Karen is thought of as a woman, there are ample examples male “Karens” out there. Elon Musk has, at various times and by various groups, been called the “space Karen.” There have been some proposed male alternatives to “Karen,” including “Ken” and “Kevin,” but ultimately, none have truly stuck.
That being said, this particular woman truly took it further than many “Karens” before her. She has decided to go on a crusade for her full adult son who has gotten himself entirely drunk. Instead of actually looking after him or thanking the bartender who is making sure he doesn’t go too far, she has concocted some sort of points system by which to argue that he should keep drinking. However, a classic part of being a “Karen” is simply not seeing employees as people.
She even goes as far as to invoke some sort of mystical “Steve” as a name that is supposed to scare the bartender. This, obviously, does not work at all, but it’s a clear example of a person being so far gone in their entitlement that they truly can not understand what is good for them. For better or worse, most customer service jobs do at least help the employee build a tolerance towards this sort of nonsense.
Readers were surprised by the lad and his mother
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