If you’ve worked in customer service or food service, you know that it’s absolutely inevitable that you will be faced with unhappy customers. You hope they are few and far between but you always have to be prepared for the worst.

OP and her friends at the coffee shop decided they would be prepared all right, and hatched a hilarious plan to really make people think about the consequences of their actions.

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 they’re 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 man taking your anger out on high school and college kids.

When someone really laid into one of the girls working the register, the “boss” would come out of the back and fire them on the spot. No amount of backpedaling would convince him to renege, either.

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 boss, 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”

OP thought it was a harmless bit of fun and would perhaps even do the next food service worker some good, but her friends said they thought it was more mean-spirited than that.

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.

AITA for this joke?

So, Reddit, is she the jerk for making people feel badly? Let’s find out!

The top comment says this is a perfect way to deal with tough customers.

This person agrees it might actually work to encourage people to change.

Although this person has their doubts.

Maybe it really is what they wanted, though.

You never want to yeet the barista.

I don’t see the harm here, really.

But I suppose something bad could always happen.