I am a high schooler with a weekend job at a coffee shop. My coworkers who work weekends are:
James – the owners son, he goes to my school. He’s a shift manager but it’s not a real formal thing, he’s a friendly guy.
Danielle – A college student who sometimes works weekends too.
So sometimes customers will come in and just be angry about such little stuff. Like literally blow up about nothing. I dunno if theyre in a bad mood already and looking for someone to take it out on or what, but it’s a lot… Like how sad so your have to be to be a grown-ass man taking your anger out on high school and college kids.
So James and I were joking about having a little fun with them and hopefully getting them off our backs.
So one day I was at work and some guy was having a temper about how we don’t make the coffee hot enough… Which I couldn’t do a thing about because I gave it to him right out of the machine.
So James came in and was like “sir is there a problem here” and the guy started ranting at him too. So he was just like “OP, this is unacceptable, you’re fired.”
I started acting real sad, like “no please don’t fire me, my family needs the money, I need this job, pleaseeee” and he played up being a hard-ass, telling me to take off my apron and leave.
The angry guy started to backtrack, like “It isn’t that big of a problem, you don’t need to fire her over it. I didn’t mean it” and James was like “No, we pride ourselves on the best customer service.”
Of course after all that drama I still had my job, we were just acting. And we’ve done it a couple times, whenever a customer will lose their temper at Danielle or I, James will storm in and “fire” us. And almost every time, the person who had come in angry will apologise and say that they didn’t mean it. It’s kind of satisfying, making people realize their actions might actually have consequences.
Anyway, I was telling my friends from school about this and a few of them thought it was a mean prank, to let someone go away thinking they’d gotten someone who desperately needs the money fired.
One day, after a particularly tense ‘firing’ incident, James pulled me aside. He looked really stressed, not like his usual friendly self. He admitted that the coffee shop isn’t doing great. They’ve gotten a bunch of really negative online reviews lately, specifically mentioning staff attitude or service, and his parents are warning him that if customer satisfaction scores don’t improve, they might have to cut hours or even let some part-timers go to save costs. He said the ‘firing’ prank isn’t just for fun; it’s the only thing he’s found that consistently gets angry people to back down and often leave feeling a little guilty, which prevents them from leaving another bad review or demanding a refund, things that actually hurt the business. He said it feels awful to do it, but he’s genuinely scared his parents will close the place or fire people like Danielle if things don’t improve.
I still think customers shouldn’t yell at us, but now I know that our prank is tied to other people’s actual job security and the survival of the shop. The prank makes the customer feel bad, but the motivation behind it is much more serious than I initially thought.
AITA for participating in this “firing” prank to de-escalate angry customers and prevent negative consequences for the coffee shop, even though my friends think it’s a cruel trick that plays on customers’ guilt, and it turns out the business is genuinely struggling?