SINGAPORE: A local Reddit user took to the platform to ask, “Are F&B workers just meant to take the scoldings they get from patrons?”
In their Christmas Day post, u/Comfortable-Mango140 wrote about an encounter with a female food delivery rider who grew impatient over the long wait for orders amid the holiday rush that day and whom they claimed kept nagging the post author to check on their order.
The post author, while normally calm and patient with customers, lost their cool with the delivery rider, finally telling her, “If you want, you go behind make it yourself.”
They explained that on a normal day, orders at the eatery where they work usually only take around 15 minutes to prepare, but because of the high volume of orders on Christmas Day, customers and delivery riders needed to wait at least 90 minutes, which they were informed of.
“They’d occasionally check up on their orders, but would just wait patiently (even though they were annoyed, which is understandable),” the post author wrote. The restaurant needed to deal with both direct orders and orders from Grab and foodpanda, which made the wait time longer.
According to the post author, the female rider kept hovering around the cash register, and when asked, said in a surly voice she’d been waiting for over an hour. She asked for her order to be checked on, adding that she had arrived before the 90-minute wait time was announced
“It was just a back-and-forth thing with her; she wouldn’t drop it, and just kept nagging that she’s been waiting for a long time. There was already a line behind her because she was blocking the people who wanted to order food,” the post author added.
This caused them to grow annoyed and answer back less than politely, to which the rider said, “You can’t say that to me.”
The post author admitted that they could have handled the situation better, although their colleague and manager merely laughed it off.
“Anyway, I’m 20, idc if you’re double or triple my age, if you’re being rude to me or my colleagues, I’m going to talk back, I understand you’re frustrated, but that doesn’t mean you get to berate us, i’ve had several customers who were angry still be able to talk nicely to us,” they added.
Reddit users commenting on the post were sympathetic to both the F&B worker and the delivery rider, and made suggestions that would help avoid this type of situation.
“F&B places should authorise their people to turn off the delivery systems when it gets backed up like that, and people should know everything is busier on a holiday and learn to prepare their food. I feel sorry for the people stuck in these situations,” wrote one.
Another held the management of the eatery responsible, writing, “Nobody should have to wait 1 hour just to eat something.”
“If you really want to blame, you should be blaming your management for not managing the orders properly… You’ve got to think from the customer’s perspective too. The rider waits 1 hour, and the customer has to wait 1 hour + delivery time.
If your management managed the orders properly, there wouldn’t be so many waiting customers and riders, and you wouldn’t have to deal with annoyed customers and riders. What they could have done was to pause the delivery orders and handle all the walk-in customers first,” they added.
Another agreed, writing, “I blame this on management, Grab management, and your restaurant management. The whole point of this technology is to make ordering and picking up efficient. If it’s going to take 90 mins for your restaurant to complete an order, the lady should be delivering something else in the interim. If she’s not able to do that, it’s a failure of the Grab system.” /TISG
