Reddit Sides With An Angry Costco Customer In Food Court Showdown

For many shoppers, a stop at the Costco food court is part and parcel of the shopping experience at the discount warehouse chain. What better way to celebrate your bulk purchases than to refuel with a well-priced $1.50 hot dog and soda combo? Better yet, how about a slice or two of delicious pizza or the entire pie? Using robots that can make a pizza in seconds and a special conveyor oven that can crank out a pie in six minutes flat (via The Kitchn), Costco sells a lot of pizzas. In fact, Costco sells so much pizza that Business Insider ranked it the 14th largest pizza chain in the United States in 2015.

Well, the popularity of the Costco pizza was the cause of a recent showdown with an angry customer at the food court. Another customer who saw the confrontation took to Reddit to ask the forum's opinion on who was at fault in the situation. According to the Tldr version, "Customer gets angry about waiting an hour for their whole pizza only to find out it hasn't even started cooking and nobody had notified him. Reason being that somebody ordered a huge bulk [order of 50 pizzas] and that took priority." According to the post, the customer insisted that the employee said they would only have a 20-minute wait.

The OP described the exchange as a "shouting match," claiming that this was the angriest they had ever seen a Costco customer get (via Reddit). Apparently, it got so bad that the employee put up a "Lane closed sign," which the irate customer moved out of the way to continue loudly airing their grievance. The most popular comment on the thread expressed empathy, explaining, "I get the customers frustration. You do not tell someone 20 minutes, and then after an hour say your pizza is not even started yet.... A bulk order should not be stopping single orders especially when you only have two pizza choices. Grab one from the bulk order for the singles and keep pumping out pizzas until you have 50 for the bulk." Sounds reasonable, but as another Redditor pointed out, "What if that wasn't the only guy waiting for a whole pizza, though?"

Others questioned how the quality would change between the first and 50th pizza, arguing that "by the time the order is totally ready you have a bunch of cold pizza." (A Costco supervisor on Quora once said pizzas that don't sell within an hour get thrown as they're no longer fresh enough, but that presumably didn't apply to this bulk order.) While most commenters seemed to blame Costco, many still thought that the customer's reaction was out of line. As one Redditor put it, "Tantrums in public are a bad look for adults."