Customer orders 5 large pizzas (order comes to $111.00). Picks them up and takes them back to her work. She just called and said that there was a spider in one of the pizza boxes and her manager is throwing up. We initially told her that we would refund her the money for this one pizza and give her another one for free, but she is insisting on getting ALL of her money back. She said they threw away all of the pizzas except for the one with the spider. We have never even seen a spider in our shop, so I am not sure what to do here. Regardless of what we do, she already said that they are never eating with us again and letting all of their employees know not to eat with us. They are an out of town company that will be here for 6 - 8 months.
What would you do? Do you bite the bullet and refund the whole order amount or just give her the money back on the one pizza?
Sounds like a scam, whats your gut saying? Were you there? Did you take the order? Or witness the actuall pick up? There are usually a bunch of red flags through experience you can recognize if youre being setup
My wife was there and she was the one that put the pizzas in the boxes. Of course she didn’t see any spiders, but who knows how it got there. She spoke to the lady that called in the complaint and said that she was very rude no matter what she suggested.
Its so hard with these situations though. I do have an issue w spiders(some of my store is in what used to be a basement) then there are sometimes a lady bug trapped in romaine. We are always on the losing end no matter how hard we try:(
Once I had a complaint about a Moth is a pizza box and the guest just would not agree to any solution I offered. So I ended up telling her the Moth was free and she hung up on me. She called back a while latter and said that was the funniest thing she heard for a long time, she is still my customer and a good one at that. Sometimes people just like to bitch.
I would apologize, thank her for bringing this to our attention, refund the money as she requested, explain what steps we were going to take to correct the situation (bleach the delivery bags, send drivers to vacuum out cars, etc…) and offer her a credit for 5 pizzas free in the future with the hope that her office would try us risk free to prove this was a freak occurrence.
It has been my experience when I deliver a larger order of pizzas to a business, the employees converge like flies and the pizzas disappear very quickly. I really doubt they threw any of the pizzas away. When a customer calls me with a complaint about a pizza and says they threw it away, I don’t do anything for them, I have to get the pizza back. If you offered to replace the pie and they wouldn’t let you, I wouldn’t worry about it. Pizza is the ONLY business out there that has to take off their pants when someone complains. I also lean toward the customer when people are reasonable and even sometimes unreasonable,but when somebody acts like your customer, that is just plain BS. They are just trying to take advantage of you. My Opinion.
I had a complaint once (including photo’s) showing an earwig (UK crawling insect not sure if you have them in the US), inside a small air bubble in the crust of a cooked pizza.
The store in question was spottless and for the insect to be in the dough was just not possible, and also for it go through the oven and look like it did was also not possible.
The customer kicked up a right fuss, ‘I’ve been sick’, claiming our store must be filthy, would tell all her friends etc etc. I spoke to the customer (she had emailed a couple of fayes later) and stated I couldn’t see anyway how it got there (went through how clean our shop is and how we had the highest food hygiene ratings issued by our council) but offered to remake her order again (pizza and a couple of sides) at a later date.
Guess what, she rang the store about an hour after I spoke to her and ordered her free food.
IF I was a customer who had guenuinely found a bug inside my food I really do doubt that I’d order so quickly even if it was for free…
Had the same with a customer stating she had found long blond hair over her pizza (not baked in of course), at the time she ordered there was me (short brown hair and bald bloke) making pies in the shop and the driver was asian with dark short hair. I actually went up to her house with a replacement and guess what… customer had long blonde hair… made the point to her but gave her the pizza as she clearly wanted a free one and made sure she knew I knew!
After making a huge fuss on the phone yesterday demanding her Full Refund, we told her to come into the store at 2pm with the Pizza that had the spider in it and we would give her the refund. My wife went into the POS system and voided/refunded her full payment and she never showed up. I told my wife she should have waited for her to show up before she processed the refund! We really wanted to see the pizza with the spider because I just can’t understand how it could have got there. We don’t offer delivery, and it wasn’t in there when my wife boxed the pizza, and I’m sure it didn’t crawl in the box on top of our hot oven…
Silver lining to this… we’ve instituted a Refund policy. Rob T, hope you don’t mind, but we are using your Refund policy from here on out…
Bring the pizzas back or pound sand. When I get told the pizza has been ‘thrown away’ is usually a red flag and that usually means the pizza is gone via ingestion. Nobody throws away pizza.
Our refund policy: Do what it takes to make the customer happy up to refunding the full amount of the order and tip given to delivery driver without needing the pizza back or arguing with the customer. Include a gift certificate with refund. Make brief note in computer including date and reason. If multiple notes, bring to my attention and I may decide to speak to customer and possible cut them off.
This has been my policy for the last 10 years and sales have nearly tripled in that time. I would rather get scammed 100 times than to suggest one person with a legitimate issue is trying to get over on me. I doubt we refund more than 2 orders a week out of the 2000 orders we do. I have cut off two people in this time for abusing this policy.
We might end up in a situation where we offer a refund about once every couple of months and where we remake something a couple of times a month… in general I want to offer the refund before it is asked for when the customer contacts us with a complaint. Big difference in how it goes down. In this case I think I would have offered that we would bring them a replacement pie or refund that pie as soon as they called. My crew is trained to “let me get you the manager” as soon as a customer indicates a problem and the managers are to offer to remake or refund.
I still think that the request to refund the whole order is not reasonable!
It is simply not worth arguing with the customer about whether there was a spider but on the other hand I agree with the other posters… if they can’t return the uneaten pies I would be very reluctant to refund the entire order. If they posted on Trip Advisor or Yelp I would post right back about my doubts about the spider and the unreasonable customer they were.
I think it has reached the point on those online forums that people understand there are some nuts out there in the world.
We had a lady freak out one time about a “pubic hair” in the box. well this Pubic hair tuned out to be the little cardboard fuzzes that come from the cutting of the box edge at the box factory. The are little jagged slivers of cardboard, super small if you know what i mean you understand
I asked her to bring it back so i could see it. She did. I immediately knew what it was. Grabbed a new box to show her that it was infact somewhat normal. Happens in like 1 out of 5 boxes i would say.
She left the store screaming about pubic hair everywhere. You can’t win them all, i just shook my head and carried on. People are INSANE
This. I swear it’s gotten to the point where everyone thinks the world revolves around them. I had a lady demand to me last week that I call my staff back, turn my ovens on and make her a pizza because we closed “way too early” for her liking. I was blown away. She was genuinely furious. I thought it was a joke before she went ballistic on me. She then left a Yelp review but must have sobered up and deleted it because I don’t see it anymore.
People like this make me want to give up. The hardest part about being in business is sucking it up and having to just get blasted with every kind of crap and just sit there and take it like it doesn’t bother me at all. It’s tough because outside of he business, I would never accept people talking like that to me. I mean, you’re demanding I make a pizza an hour after closing? Really? Because you’re hungry? Lady I’ve been here for 13 hours finishing a 100 hour week while you’re sipping margaritas on vacation. People deserve to get checked yet they can’t because we lose business and are considered animals. Maybe one day we will all band together and fight back. Who knows.
Wow,
No me having very little tolerance for stupidity like that, I would’ve had a little fun at her expense before she left,
I probably would have asked her to prove it was not one of hers, or say something that it looks suspiciously close to her natural color…
But thats just me being a dick