She Wanted a Pre-Made Thanksgiving Meal Box — There Weren’t Enough to Go Around, and She Wasn’t Happy
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As someone who used to work for a catering company, this story brought back a few bad memories…
Because dealing with the public and serving them food can sometimes be a Herculean task!
The person who wrote this story was just a kid when all of this went down…
And he lived to tell the tale!
Check out what happened this particular Thanksgiving with a customer who didn’t want to take NO for an answer.
You should have assumed I was coming to this thing I never heard about! You ruined Thanksgiving!
“I grew up in a family that owned a catering company.
One year in the early 1980s we tried an experiment: Thanksgiving in a Box.
For this and other reasons we only did it one year and then ran screaming in horror.
For whatever price it was – like $130 at the time – you got a box containing a cooked turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, salad, dressing, cranberry sauce, rolls, butter, gravy, pumpkin pie.
They were ready to go!
Each box fed 8 people, buy as many as you wanted. Specify if you wanted to pick it up hot. Ready to eat, or cold and you’d reheat later.
Pre-orders were required. Not a suggestion, mandatory.
6 am on T-Day we were there.
Car pulls up, gives us the name, Pack mule me would find the box with that name and load in into the car so they could drive away. Repeat hundreds of times.
Everybody get your boxes by 4 pm so we can go gnaw on bits of dead bird ourselves. Kid me couldn’t stay away from the stuffing we made from scratch and I had to smell it all day long. Kid me was not increasing in sympathy as the day dragged on.
Around noon a lady showed up and when asked for her name declared it to be “my neighbor got one of these boxes this morning and it looked so good I came to get one myself.”
Well…
Kid me: these boxes were all pre-ordered, did you do that?
Lady: no, I just want one
Hungry, getting grouchy kid me with all of the tact 10 year old hungry grouchy kid me could muster: I only have boxes for people on the list. (And asked the next person in line for their name).
She wasn’t taking no for an answer…
Lady: I need a box, go get me one
Kid me: I’ll get the boss when I go in to find this customer’s order. I don’t know how to process new orders. He will come out to talk to you about it.
10 year old me, craving stuffing, was not terribly diplomatic.
Once in the kitchen, I found the boss.
Me: hey dad, some lady isn’t on the list but wants a box anyway.
I then gathered up a box, took it outside, told the lady somebody was coming and got the next name.
Sometimes, it’s best to let Dad handle it.
My dad had been drafted for Korea and spent the war doing administrative things for officers who were old and set in their ways since WWII and was good at dealing with mentally ill mothers of brides, so whatever he said eventually made her go away.
I did get snippets of her crying and yelling about how this ruined Thanksgiving and we had so many there should be extras and could we sell her ours since she knew we must have some set aside for us.
Eventually I took a box out to another car and she was gone.
As the son of the owner I brazenly raided the freezer and grabbed a couple lumps of the frozen Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookie dough, wolfed them down and got back to loading cars.
As we wrapped up I snuck into the hot racks and picked a bowl of stuffing and hid in a back corner while I inhaled it.
And I didn’t share any with her.”
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This lady was nuts!
And she was blaming her problems on a little kid!
This was pretty wild…
Some customers think the whole world revolves around them…
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