Enraged Workers Who Quit Restaurants On The Spot Share What Triggered It

He’ll Always Put Family Over Work

“When I was in college, I waited tables at a restaurant that was open on Thanksgiving. After I had already worked the lunch shift (covering for someone who took off for the holiday), I was ready to finish my shift and head out so I could have Thanksgiving dinner with my family. That’s when my manager informed me that they were going to need me to cover the dinner shift too because one of the older waitresses called out (probably to spend Thanksgiving with her family).

When I told him I had plans already, he said I needed to cover the shift since I had the least seniority and ‘they wouldn’t need someone who isn’t a team player’ (implying I’d be fired) if I didn’t cover it. I told him, ‘I don’t need this job that much to miss Thanksgiving dinner with my family,’ and handed in my apron and left and never returned.”

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The Owner’s Kids Had Him Seeing Red

“I was a server in a low-quality restaurant where the owner’s kids were managers and had no prior work experience. One kid set up a deal with a bank for a private party and I ended up serving and bartending for this group of 20-30 my entire shift. It came time for them to pay the bill and the manager that set up the special deal (it was a limited menu but for a huge discount/set price) wasn’t there, so the manager that was there assumed the previously discussed amount included tip (20% minimum on groups of 8 or more). It did not. So after closing out, I was informed that, due to their miscommunication, I would not be receiving any money at all. Moreso, because I served many of the patron’s drinks, I would have to tip out the bartender at the main bar, even though I actually bartended by myself at the separate smaller bar.

So this idiot wanted me to pay something like $150 at the end of a full shift. Walked out and never went back. Place shut down a few months later, to the surprise of no one.”

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All He Could Do After That Was Laugh

“I quit on the spot from McDonald’s because I couldn’t find the trash bags. They weren’t in any of the closets or the 2-3 random places they were usually at). I asked a manager if he had seen them and he said: ‘oh my god, are you mentally handicapped?’ Then he pulled them out from a location I had never seen them before in the two years I had worked there. I just started laughing and I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll be back in 20 minutes.’

I went home, changed, and brought all my uniforms back into work. I had two other jobs and was only working there two nights a week so I wasn’t too worried about using them for a resume or anything.

There was a TON of other stuff that led up to me quitting and I had already started thinking about leaving. I thought it was wildly inappropriate for him to call me mentally deficient and I really wanted to go home and play Breath of the Wild (it was the week the Switch came out and I had already preordered it), so I used it as an opportunity to quit. Don’t let your managers call you names and don’t put up with it or a job barely paying more than minimum wage. My life has been much better since leaving.”

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“Making Too Big Of A Deal Over $40…”

“I found out that the owner of a Quiznos had been rounding my hours down on my paychecks and when I confronted her about it, she blew it off and said I was making way too big a deal over some $40.

Then she said, ‘The Pepsi order isn’t going to put itself away, you know?’

I went out to the front of the store just as people started to line up for the lunch rush and I took my apron off and left. Halfway to the door, the store manager caught up to me and we left together and the store owner only caught on to it as she saw us leaving the parking lot.”

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Couldn’t Handle The Stress, So He Got Out Of The Kitchen

“I’m a cook and it was two stages. The first stage was my boss moved me from nice weekday prep shifts to busy weekend night closing shifts without asking me or even discussing it with me. She just posted the schedule. This was because the night cook quit due to the crazy workload of night shifts. The second stage was a busy Saturday night when everything just went to garbage. We had order tickets puking out of the machine with no end in sight. About three hours in, I remember going into the walk-in freezer, closing my eyes while breathing deep and hard in a panic.

I was just trying to calm myself. I think it was the first time in my life I actually had a panic attack, or close to it. I finished the night, cleaned the kitchen up, and went home. I wrote out my two-week notice and gave it to my boss the next day. No job is worth that level of stress. We should have had 2-3 cooks in that kitchen for how busy it was on the weekends, not one.”

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Do They Even Want This Job?

“I was an assistant manager at a restaurant. Every semester, I set up a class schedule to go back to school and every time, the owner couldn’t (or wouldn’t) accommodate any schedule to allow this. After several semesters of this, I put together a full schedule that only required a 2-hour change to my start time on one day and he was pulling his same old stuff. I persisted and he grew agitated, eventually yelling, ‘Why do you need to go to school? Do you even want this job?’

Well dang, when you put it that way…Here’s my key.”

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Why People Shouldn’t Falsely Accuse Their Hardest Worker Of Slacking Off

“I worked in a chain restaurant as a server. The management policy was to cut anyone about to hit overtime to secure management’s quarterly bonus. We were the anomaly of this particular chain, near a lot of tourist attractions and ALWAYS busy, especially on the final day of the pay week but management didn’t care. Cut kitchen, cut expediters, cut hosts, cut servers. We’d sometimes even try to have a 45m-1hr false wait with have the restaurant empty. This would force management to try to cook, expedite, serve, etc. Of course, this never worked.

A few weeks went by where I had to kindly tell people in the waiting area to try other places in the area when they asked for a manager to complain. I would literally tell them the manager was the only cook and they couldn’t speak to them. Actually had a few tables wait and sit in my section cause they said they appreciated the honesty of someone telling them why the waits were long.

Eventually, I’d been scheduled a double on last day of pay week and we were slammed. I was making good money so I decided to pretty much forego my break between shifts and do/fix side work that someone from day shift did only half way. So while I was skipping my meal and cleaning someone else’s mess, a manager began cutting people in the kitchen then came to me and said, ‘This station looked horrible all day, I knew it was you assigned to it.’ I wasn’t.

I looked him in the eye, dropped what I was working on and walked into the office. Told the manager I liked I was done and he knew from the look on my face that I was serious even though he knew I was scheduled for a double. He just said the other manager’s name to me and I said yes and the look he gave me told me he hated the other manager more than anyone else.

No regrets. Got a much better job and started a new career a month later.”

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He Never Got Mad, He Just Got Even

“This was the only time I ever walked out of a job was at my first restaurant gig. I was there for two years and loved the place, it was local and generally took good care of us. I was FOH but usually covered BOH shifts since I’d taken the time when I got hired to learn everything except the sauté station. I worked 6-7 days a week and more often than not 12 straight hours with no breaks.

Then we got a new head chef. This dude was the biggest idiot I’d ever seen and as soon as he started, the turnover in the kitchen went up to 10 guys a month. We only ever had 12 or so employed at any given time.

One day, I was on my way to work when my car tire exploded. And I mean, I went skidding on the rotor for a second. I called in and sent pictures to my manager who said it was fine. So I took the day off to get it repaired so I could be back the next day.

I came in the next day to my final check. APPARENTLY, the head chef decided to make an example of me, according to my manager who seemed sorry to have to let me go. Whatever, I had planned to quit soon anyway.

Well, I stopped in a few weeks later while I was in the area and said hi to a few coworkers I still liked. The area manager (an idiot for other reasons, like several harassment claims from underage female employees) was there as my other manager had apparently quit the same week he had to fire me. The area manager asked me to come back because they were extremely short staffed and they needed someone that already knew the layout of the place to train any new hires.

I said okay, with a plan already in mind. A week later they put me on a solo closing shift. Just me, a busser, and three cooks. No management, no anybody. About an hour after the head chef left I locked the doors down, finished up the last table or two, and told the cooks to shut it down and go home. Six hours early.

I shut everything down and walked out of that place with the biggest grin on my face.

Yelp reviews ever since have been worse and worse. They went from four stars to two, and last I heard they had a C on their health inspection.”

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Her Manager Began To Sabotage Her

“I worked my way from cook to assistant manager at a booming restaurant. My shifts started doing amazing numbers from our internal metrics by a large margin and getting the big boss’s attention.

Store manager starts scheduling very little to no crew members for my shifts. Had no cooks on Friday/Saturday nights so I’d have to do all the cooking AND manage the front of the house. The store manager then promotes her freeloading nephew Steve, whom most of the staff hated. He had a constant huge discolored/gross STD sore on his lips which disgusted a lot of the customers who’d come in for a meal.

One day it was just her nephew and I for like the first 2 hours of my shift. Her nephew just walked around aimlessly with a clipboard and wouldn’t help at all when I asked. Took off my apron, threw it on on a counter, got in my car and just drove away.

I read reviews recently and it dropped from a 4+ star rating to below 2 stars with numerous complaints of how trashy, slow, prejudiced, and run down the place has turned into.”

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Once He Realized His Full Potential, He Decided He’d Had Enough

“I worked at a spirit shop in Oakland for a bit. Thought it would be good for me because I wouldn’t have to take work home with me and could focus on my art. Pay was awful, but I’m an artist so I’m used to it right? I did my job awesome. The store was constantly clean, organized and well stocked. I couldn’t afford to eat anything other than potatoes and the free can of chili I got on the days I work, but I’m making my art. Also, because this place is old school and seniority rules, there was no chance of moving up the ladder. The guys that had been there forever didn’t do anything except work the register and read magazines. Again, I didn’t really care, I’m a hard worker and have pride in my work.

After a bit of this, surprise surprise, I got sick. Really sick. I still came into work but got sent home immediately. I ended up missing a week of work that I couldn’t afford. The day I came back in, I stepped through the door only to find the store in shambles.

I mean, it looked like a garbage man had taken his time wrecking the place. You ever been in one of those stores where things are missing from the shelves, half-opened boxes tossed everywhere and you just walk out? It was exactly like that. I turned to the other guy on shift working behind the counter and, without looking away from his newspaper, he said, ‘You should probably start stocking now.’

It was at that moment I realized that I had been running the store the entire time for minimum wage, and it would never pay off and no one would ever care. I took one last look around the derelict shell of the store I had spent the last six months caring about, and without even looking away from the half stocked drink coolers said, ‘Nah,’ and just turned and left.”

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Going Beyond The Limit With Customers

“I was closing down the Cozzolis Pizza, now Villa Pizza, at the mall when I was 16. I had a small line of four people with a really impatient lady at the end. I helped each person as professionally as possible but through each person, the last lady kept interjecting, ‘What’s the hold-up?!’ or ‘Can you hurry this up?!’ and just being rude the whole time. So much so the other customers looked at her in shock. When I finally got to her, we didn’t have what she wanted. She told me to make it new, which was against policy as we were five minutes to close, and I explained the policy. Her anger rose a great deal about this time. I politely said I’d give her anything she would like that we still had available at a discount. She declined very rudely by calling me all sorts of names then demanded again that I make her fresh pizza. I again said no and refused her service.

She asked if she could speak to the manager. I flipped my hat around and said, ‘Lady, I am the manager!’ I was not the manager. She continued to call me names and said she’d be talking to the daytime manager tomorrow, but when I closed up shop and came in the next day (my day off), I didn’t see her. I decided this wasn’t worth my time anymore and gave my keys to the actual manager to let him know that I quit.”

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For All His Hard Work, All He Got Was A Stupid Frisbee

“The owner of a pizza place I worked at hosted a special event for the brew club and had vendors and local brewery owners at a table with him. They were all seated at a giant table of about 20 seats that had new guests rotating in every so often, so there were several dozen people over the course of the night. The owner wanted me to wait on their table exclusively, which meant bussing the people who were leaving without disrupting the people who were still eating, and keeping everyone’s glasses full and appetizers and pizzas coming constantly. He snapped at me in front of everyone when one of the bowls of garlic knots was down to half full and again when I couldn’t recite all 30 something dinks on tap by memory even though they changed out weekly.

The owner picked up the tab for all his guests (and I overheard him tell them he would get the tip as well) at the end of the night. The table’s tab was over a grand, so I was expecting maybe $200 if he was feeling generous but certainly not less than $150. Later, after drinking, he pulled me aside and told me I did a great job at the end of the night and gave me a frisbee that one of the brewery owners had given him.

Then as I was cleaning up, I saw on the receipt that he gave zero tip (literally wrote zeros in the tip field on his credit card receipt). And of course, none of the guests left anything. This was for servers’ wages which are $2.15 an hour. I was so livid and humiliated, I called before my next shift and told the manager I wouldn’t be coming in anymore. He was like, ‘You have to-‘ and I just hung up. Picking up my last paycheck was kind of awkward. I still have the frisbee though, it’s pretty solid.”

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Getting Shot Down For A Job Well Done

“I worked at a deli that also did sandwich platters for catering. The boss sucked at ever being prepared for these orders so we always had to work super hard from first thing in the morning to get them filled on time while also preparing for walk-in customers lunches.

One day, the owner came out and I excitedly told him about how quickly we had finished the catering and how it was ready to be delivered. In response to this, I got quite the yelling at for not remembering to turn on all the lights in the cabinet. He was a terrible boss in general but this was the final straw. I tried to stick up for myself and explain that it was okay and I would turn it on but that this was not appropriate behavior. He got right up in my face and told me I had no respect for authority and that I didn’t deserve any job and that if I continued to talk to him that way, he would call all of his ‘contacts’ and see to it that I would never work again.

Unfortunately, I have no guts so I waited until he left to go back to his office, covered a coworkers’ break, and then walked out.”

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