I have been working since I was 16 years old in all sorts of jobs in varying fields. By far my worst customer interactions were all at Starbucks. The pinnacle of this horrible experience came during what turned into a natural disaster.
In October of 2005 a hurricane hit southern Florida. It was called Wilma. Our Starbucks, which was in Broward County, was one of the last Starbucks to close. In fact, our district was the last group of stores to close in the entire area. I literally got into my house just minutes before the storm actually hit. Prior to leaving the store as we were cleaning up and performing closing duties, with the lights flickering on and off and with every other business already closed and empty, we had customers coming to our doors pounding on them to be let in so they could buy either drinks or a pound of coffee to "get through the hurricane!"
One female customer stood outside for several minutes yelling for us to let her in. Mind you, the wind is blowing hard at this point and the sky was getting unusually dark for that time of day. The usually busy streets were empty. This neighborhood, a typically bustling business district, was a ghost town. She screamed at us that she needed her coffee. She was out! How was she going to get through the storm without coffee?! All the grocery stores are closed! Even the 7/11's were closed! What was she to do?! She even kicked at the doors.
We counted six different customers attempting to get into the store to make some sort of purchase. This did not include the customers who drove by our store very slowly to see if we were open. Of couse, our store was not the only store in the district to experience this. At any rate, it was deeply disturbing. It was stressful enough as it was, knowing we were going to go through a hurricane and desperately wanting to get home to some modicum of safety. We wanted to prepare for the storm as well! But to have six people so unconcerned for their and our safety was appalling.
After the storm our power was out for over a week. For some reason, two days after the storm, even though the power was out, our DM made us all come in to do a "deep clean." She wanted to take 'advantage' of the down time. This while all of us had no electricity or hot water ourselves! That was bad enough. However, when some people saw activity at our stores they came by to see if we were open. One guy suggested we go and get a genorator so we would open up the store! Um, we had no milk!!! It had spoiled after the storm knocked out the power. And it was a scarce supply at the grocery stores (only half of which were open because they had huge genorators).
I don't know if it was just our area that brought out the stupidity of people or if this sort of thing would happen in any area of the US after a natural disaster. But it made me sick to my stomach. I quit shortly after this.