People Share Stories About The Worst Buffet Customers They’ve Encountered

For any food lover, buffets are a dream come true. To be able to customize your plate with the exact amount of different entrees, sides, and toppings you want is a pretty genius idea. It’s like serving yourself at home, only you don’t have to do any of the cooking, and there are dozens of bites to eat you can pick from to put on your plate. Oh, and the best part? Many buffets are all-you-can-eat, meaning you can get seconds, thirds, and so on – usually for one flat cost.

But that latter part is one of the biggest issues with buffets. People tend to take advantage of “all-you-can-eat” by sitting in the restaurant for hours on end, clearly overstaying their welcome to get a full day’s worth of meals for a slim cost. Others like to chow down plate upon plate at dinnertime with no remorse while other buffet goers try to sneak extra food home, even when the policy is nothing to-go. Because people take advantage, it’s no wonder why many restaurants, hotels, and other facilities with food buffets create rules for self-service.
Sadly, not everyone is as mindful of their actions at a buffet, and although it’s a definite problem, it’s not always about taking advantage of the establishment providing the food.

Besides the latter problem, below, you’ll also read stories where people cause themselves bodily harm from overeating at buffets, turn a clean restaurant into a health hazard, lash out because they had a disagreement with a buffet worker, or even make a massive mess at the facility they’re dining in, all because of a lack of buffet etiquette. In fact, these stories are so crazy that the buffet workers who witnessed these folks would consider them their worst customers!
31. She Put Plates And Plates Of Gizzards Into Her Purse

“I used to manage a KFC with a buffet. On Tuesdays, we had senior citizen discounts, so we would have livers and gizzards on the buffet.

Typically, they went pretty well but not insanely fast.

One day, we just couldn’t keep the gizzard pan full, which made no sense. There were only maybe six people in the dining room, so unless they were big-time gizzard eaters, one full pan should have lasted a while.

I had the buffet worker put a fresh pan out and then watched as a woman walked up and filled a plate with an overflowing pile of gizzards. No big deal if she’s actually eating that.
As I kept watching, though, I saw her take the plate and dump all the gizzards in her purse. I went to her table to confront her and said that the all you can eat buffet does not allow for takeout.

She screamed at me and said I was accusing her of lying and stealing. I pointed out that her purse was wide open and I could see the quart-size Ziploc bag filled with gizzards. I grabbed the bag and threw them out while she screamed about never coming back and calling the manager (me) and calling the Better Business Bureau.
Surprisingly, I never saw her again.” HotsauceMcGuyver

30. Firefighters Had To Physically Remove Her From The Booth

“My biggest story was at an all you can eat Chinese place. A rather rotund customer arrived and wedged herself into a booth. Besides being a grade-A ***** to begin with, she had the gall to request the waitstaff to bring her food since she didn’t want to get up from the table and I guess to funnel food into her arteries.

I was bussing tables and watching from afar, so I didn’t get directly involved. What ensued with utter karma for her being a sh*tty person to the staff and acting like she owned the place.
When she was finished eating, she could not physically get up or get out of her booth doing her being so stuffed, large in general, and wedged in. I was told by her waiter that the look in her eyes when she had to deprecatingly ask for help was priceless.

The manager eventually had to call the fire department to come remove the table from the floor to get her out.

All the while, she continued complaining and was a terrible customer. Didn’t leave a tip either because of ‘poor service’ or something. I didn’t care too much because it’s a funny memory that gets me through the week to this day.” Jufro117
29. He Sued Us After We Kicked Him Out

“Years ago, I was working as a server/busser at an all you can eat seafood buffet. One night, a guy and his wife came in and stayed for over 5 hours. The husband ate so much that the kitchen couldn’t keep up. He was taking the entire warming trays from the buffet table to his table.

A WHOLE tray at a time of fried shrimp! Then cod fillets. Then crab legs. Then fried oysters. You name it. He ate an entire tray.
When the closing time eventually came, the guy wouldn’t leave! He just kept eating more and more. When we wouldn’t bring out any more food, he began to panic, and twice he actually grabbed some of the plastic lobsters we used to decorate the buffet and tried to eat them. Me and a few other employees actually had to physically remove him from the restaurant at that point! On top of all that weirdness, his poor wife did not eat a single thing that night because apparently she didn’t like fish, and literally everything in the restaurant had fish in it, even the bread.

The guy ended up suing the restaurant owner for false advertising. Despite his inept legal counsel, he settled out of court with an agreement that he could eat as much as he wanted at any time, for free. All he had to do was eat it on display in the front window as a sort of advertisement/freakshow for the restaurant.” kind2311

28. He’d Only Come In For Pickles And Ranch

“There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who clearly wasn’t all there in the head. He was functional but very weird. As the months progressed, he got WAY weirder.

He started wearing women’s underwear over his clothes, even going so far as to stuff his bra. Picture a 6’2″ 250lb dude with a baby face wearing silky underpants and a lace bra over ratty jeans and a stained Hawaiian shirt; that’s our guy. He went from being able to hold a sort of normal conversation to just spouting conspiracy theory word salad.
But the weirdest thing was his change in eating habits. He used to eat a variety of our soup/salad/baked potato options from our buffet, but as his mental health deteriorated, so did his desire for variety. I guess. By the time his weirdness devolved to aggression and we had to refuse service to him, he was coming in for two things: pickles and ranch dressing.

He’d pile as many pickle slices as he could onto his plate, then put so much ranch on them the dressing and pickle juice would be running all over the tray. He’d eat it all, and his face would be covered in ranch and pickle bits. Then he’d drink water straight from the pitcher he inevitably stole from the wait station, sliming it with pickle ranch slobber. Never a dull moment with that dude around!
Pickle Boy, wherever you are today, I really hope you got the help you so desperately needed, but I was not sorry to see you go.” cawatxcamt

Another User Comments:

“Sounds like schizophrenia.

It’s not abnormal for a sufferer’s sense of taste to be affected, sometimes causing them to be picky eaters. Add in the conspiracies, word salad, and decline, and it all fits. Hope he got help.” MuNot

27. She Let Her Dog Eat From The Buffet… Straight From It

I just don’t understand people like this.

“I used to work at Whole Foods, and a woman came in with her small dog and puts it in the child part of her cart.
She goes to the buffet section, and as she’s looking, she starts to take small bits with her hands and gives it to her dog to sample.

She continues letting the dog lick her hand clean of various foods and puts it back in to grab more from the open tray.

Then she decides what she wants to eat and goes to get a box to fill it, but the dog started whining because she stopped feeding it, so she picked it up and straight put it on the counter to eat out of the tray like a bowl.
It happened relatively quickly and no staff saw it, but a customer came upfront and told us a woman had a dog too close to the food and we said, ‘Ok, we’ll check” because service animals were common.

Then we check the security camera later and realize the sheer level of ‘***’ going on all at once.
All of the food was rotated out, and the lady’s picture went on our ‘gross offender’ wall.” vadermonkey

26. He Literally Pooped Himself To Death

“I used to work in an all you can eat buffet, I would usually be the one who cleans up after people once closing hours pass. Essentially I was the de facto janitor of the place.

This one time I had to clean the bathrooms after the place closed. No problems in the female bathroom, but when I went into the male restroom, the image was burned into my retina instantly.

An old man was lying on the floor, face down in a puddle of muck. Not just any sewage muck, but opaque, black muck. It had the color of motor oil. Smelled awful too, like a mix of fecal matter and rotting durian. Certainly didn’t help that the liquid wasn’t just smeared all over the floor, but spread across the walls too. There were ******* handprints across the wall, presumably when the geezer was trying to stand himself up.
I peered into the toilet, more of that brown liquid, along with chunks of corny poop. There’s also this fluid in your digestion called chyme.

It’s basically the thing right before food turns into poop, the pulpy acidic liquid with partially digested food in it. I could see scraps of chicken breast and sauce mixed in there with the pulpy chyme.

As for the old guy? Well, turns out, he didn’t merely faint. He actually died. I was in a room with a fresh, decomposing corpse in the stages of Algor mortis. He had his pants off. Presumably he **** himself to death, but I don’t know. The guy emptied himself like one of those cement mixers you’d see in a cartoon, except you just replace the cement with a liquid that embodies death itself.

Needless to say, I, like him, emptied my digestive contents, just from the opposite end that he did. After that, I quit. **** that place, man.” Mediocre_Liar

25. He Made A Foot-Tall Salad With His Incredible Engineering Skills

I don’t know if this is impressive or embarrassing.

“I worked at Wendy’s when they had salad bars. You could get a single-serving bowl. They used to serve eat-in chili in styrofoam bowls, and the large doubled as a chili bowl), or all you can eat platters (the Taco Salad bottom plate).

On a slow afternoon, this guy came in and got a single serving bowl. After a few minutes, our manager motioned to me and the sandwich guy to discreetly take a look at the salad he was making.

The guy had filled the bowl with salad, then made a ring of overlapping cucumber slices to extend the lip of the bowl upwards. He filled that with salad, then added another ring. It took several minutes to build this thing, but by the time he’d finished, he had a tower of salad well over a foot tall, with multiple rings of cucumber slices containing it.

That salad was an engineering marvel. He carefully carried it back to his table, sat down, then looked up guiltily as our manager walked out to him.

The manager handed him a ‘free item’ coupon, and said, ‘That is the most impressive salad I have ever seen.

Your next one is on me.'” Jef_Wheaton
24. When The Dessert Bar Opened Up, She Went Absolute Nuts

Gluttony at it’s finest.

“We have this huge buffet with a separate dessert buffet that is presented with fireworks and dry ice and people walking around the restaurant with bells every weekend night.
This one time we had a hotel guest who kinda resembled Jabba the Hutt in size. She had a walker and used it to sit on if she was tired of walking. Now I usually assume these people just have a disease or disorder which causes them to not be able to lose any weight.

This woman was different.

She started with four eggs, munched down two plates of fries, ate three steaks, six pancakes and downed seven cokes with that. (YES, I counted). I couldn’t keep track of it all, but it was at least eight plates of food.
She then proceeded to wait for the dessert to be set up. It usually starts at 7 and we use ‘do not cross’ tape as a fun prop for the kiddos. She was there sitting on her walker at 6:45.

Once the fireworks and ice were removed, she went ALL IN. This woman was taking full cakes to her table, dipping EVERYTHING in our chocolate fountain and literally PUSHING kids out of her way to get to some sweets first.

I saw her just grabbing stuff with her bare hands (we have these tong thingies for everything) and putting her hands in the fountain.
It made me physically sick to watch, man.” fudgepunch

23. They’d Take Whole Pizzas From The Buffet

That’s one way to do it, I guess.

“At one point, I worked for a pizza place that used to have a day buffet I would make pizzas for.

One time, two huge dudes come at the moment we open for the buffet. The manager on duty dropped the first two pizzas down on the buffet, turned to grab the next two, turned back and both pizzas were gone.

A few minutes later both dudes walk back up. Each one takes an entire pizza again and walks back to continue eating. They proceeded to do this over and over, grabbing an entire pizza each for themselves for the entire 3 hours we were offering the buffet.
Was one **** of a day.” mysticbooka

22. She Stuck Her Dirty Cast Under Our Chocolate Fountain

“I worked at a buffet for about 4 years, so I feel like this is my time to shine.

The buffet I worked at had a chocolate fountain, and half of my time on the clock was spent trying to keep customers from sticking their fingers and other non-food items into the fountain.

I distinctly remember one woman with a cast on her arm who came up and started to dip some strawberries into the fountain. Next thing I know, she manages to stick most of her cast under the fountain so that the thing is basically coated with chocolate. Instead of trying to alert a staff member so the fountain could be closed down, sanitized, etc., she proceeded to casually walk back to her table and eat her dessert. I can’t even keep track of the number of times we had to close down the chocolate fountain to replace the chocolate that had been contaminated because some idiot thought it would be funny to stick their hand or face into it.

This place was also the only establishment that I have ever had to work where the carpets were professionally deep cleaned almost weekly because people would gorge themselves and then vomit on the floors. We also had many customers who would basically poop on walls of the stall rather than in the toilet so the bathrooms were almost always a nightmare to clean. Many people paid other employees to clean up vomit and other bodily fluids if they didn’t have the stomach for it.” Cursedknightartorias

21. He Intentionally Caused Havoc At Our Buffet

“I was a cook for a grocery co-op. We had a breakfast and lunch buffet every day.

We had one regular who would come in take a bowl (bowls were for grits and oatmeal at a set price, regular food went in a box and was priced by weight) and put his breakfast food, potatoes, eggs, biscuits and covered it with a thin layer of grits.
After a few days of watching him do this, I confronted him at the register and told the cashier to weigh his cup and charge him that. He was not very stoked, but he had realized he had been found out.

The very next morning, he came in and made a B-line for the coffee (not out of the ordinary for 7 am), and he grabbed a box.

I thought I had struck a chord with him and he learned a lesson. ******* nope, he dumps his whole cup of coffee in the fresh-off-the-grill pan of scrambled eggs. Somehow he convinced the store manager that it ‘was just an accident.’
About a week goes by before he makes his return, I see him grab a 12 oz cup and start squeezing honey into it like it was cool. I walked right over and grabbed that cup out of his hand and walked it into my manager’s office and told him to see who done it. He was subsequently banned from the store, trespassed by the police, and had his co-op ownership fees returned.

He ran into me and my girlfriend at a local restaurant on the 4th of July. As he was walking in, I look up and we make eye contact and I kind of loudly said, ‘Yo, that’s the ******* d*ckhead with the coffee!’ He turned around, got in his car, and left.
**** that guy, and **** that job.” stonedgoofy

20. Parts Of Her Body Dragged Through The Mashed Potatoes

I can’t believe this story is supposedly legit.

“I’m not a worker. That being said, I was at a KFC in Bartonville, Illinois. They have a small buffet with the essentials of KFC: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, coleslaw, and a few other things I’m sure no one has ever touched.

I’ve already sat down to eat, watching this older lady (about 60) walk up to the buffet.

If you know anything about this area (309), you know the quality of people we are dealing with.
This older lady walks up and grabs a piece of chicken in the very back part of the buffet, without a bra, and her right ****** falls out. Now her shirt wasn’t exactly what I would call age-appropriate, but there it is hanging out of the bottom.

I can not stop staring.

She doesn’t wipe it off; I wasn’t even sure if she knew what happened.

Her right ****** drags through the mashed potatoes.

I have to investigate. I have to see what the damage was.

There is a valley dug out by the tip of her bosom!

I had to leave.” Dennygreatness

19. He Took An Entire Bucket Of Food

“I worked at a Christian Campground during the summers in my teen years in the mess halls. We would get different groups ranging from 10 to over 1,500 people in size. So naturally, we would prepare food in accordance with the size of the group(s). However, this one particular event happened that I cannot let go of unspoken. It still haunts me to this day 5 years later.

Watched a 350+ lb fellow bring a 5-gallon bucket into the buffet line. Thought nothing of it until I watched him pour an entire tray of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, ALL of the gravy and rolls into this thing. I was actually frozen in time watching this happen. He was the last one to go through the line. So it wasn’t as if guests went hungry.

The best part is he just walked back to his room with his Jim Baker Bucket as if it were just a normal Sunday.” Kingjoker776

18. He Slept In The Back With The Rest Of Them After Eating

I don’t work at a buffet, but I was that guy.

I’d been backpacking on the Appalachian Trail for a couple of months (it’s a 2,100-mile hiking trail that runs from Georgia to Maine, along the US Appalachian Mountain range). Been eating nothing but ramen & instant oatmeal since Gatlinburg. I was getting hungry, OK? I was having dreams about meat.
So my friend and I hiked down from the trail to this tiny town, Catawba, Virginia, that only has one restaurant, The Homeplace for all you can eat fried chicken.

We walk in. We sit down. A waitress brings us a platter of fried chicken and a basket of homemade biscuits. And whenever we start running low, she brings another platter.

It’s not like most buffets, where the food’s crappy and watery and sugary but at least it’s unlimited. No. It’s the best **** fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. Crisp and juicy and greasy and just perfect.
Me and my pal gorge on fried chicken. Eat at least 5lbs each. I’m starting to feel very uncomfortable, so when the waitress shows up with the next platter, I wave her off. She clears the table. And then she comes back carrying a delicious-looking blackberry cobbler.
So we polish off the cobbler (it would have been impolite not to), pay our bill, grab our backpacks from the foyer and stand on the porch, contemplating the 1,500′ climb back up to the trail.

And it becomes obvious that there is no conceivable way we are climbing back up to the trail tonight. So I go back inside and ask the hostess if there’s anywhere to camp here in town, and she tells me, ‘you’re welcome to sleep in the gazebo out back.’ Apparently, this happens all the time. We were not the only hikers in the gazebo that evening. These two other dudes came in later and ate harder and had to sleep it off with us.”  cortechthrowaway
17. They Turned Our Buffet Into An Eating Contest

“Every year right after Christmas my work (IHOP) has All You Can Eat Pancakes.

Now normally people order it, get the first full (5) stack and barely take a bite out of the next round (2)

But last year I was working an overnight Saturday shift and I had a group of 8 teenagers come in. They wanted to see how many they could eat. They made it to 100 pancakes. One kid alone ate 23 (and then puked them up in the parking lot). They made me take a picture of them with all the plates stacked up. It became a local legend. Groups of teenagers kept coming in and trying to beat them. I think one group may have eaten 100 and a half.

The cooks weren’t very happy about it and I only made like $13 as my tip that night but it was pretty fun to watch them scarf down the pancakes. And they were so proud of themselves too.” SydtheKyd1016

16. She Had Explosive Diarrhea Through Her Skirt

That’s the last time she’ll ever wear a skirt to a buffet!

“Working at a Pizza Hut years ago, and there was a buffet every lunchtime.

An older woman was in line to fill up her plate and ended up having explosive diarrhea. She was wearing a skirt, so it literally just fell to the floor and was everywhere all around the buffet island.

We were so embarrassed for her. Poor lady. It stunk soooo bad throughout the restaurant, I thought we would shut everything down, so we could properly clean it up and sanitize the area… Nope!
My boss literally mopped it up and told everyone it was a backed-up pipe in the dishwasher area. I couldn’t even! Needless to say, I didn’t eat at work that day.” reddiculous123

15. They Scraped Their Leftovers Onto The Floor

“Years ago, I worked at an all-you-can-eat country buffet in South Carolina. I was a busboy.

One day, I went to a table. It was a mess, as per usual. It looked to be a large family/group of families of around 12 people or so.

The thing that stuck it in my memory is that whenever they had finished with what they were going to eat, they would scrape their plate and use it again. Scrape their plates… onto the floor next to their chairs. So, next to each chair, there was a 6- to 18-inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of backed potatoes, etc.” which_spartacus
Another User Comments:

“This is going to sound horribly racist, but in fact, it’s not at all because some cultures do indeed have this eating manner, which is by no means looked on as disgusting in their home country.

But my question is, where they from a particularly identifiable country? For example, could they have been Chinese, in which it is common to put your spare scraps on the table or even the floor beside the table? I wouldn’t be too surprised if that’s the case.

And again, I’m not racist, I’ve been living in China for almost 20 years; I’m d*mn near a native. It’s just a thing people do here. No big deal.” MrSpixe
14. They’d Take Advantage Of Our Expensive Meats

They didn’t even try to hide it.

“So, I worked at a Brazilian churrascaria, which is one of those places where you sit at a table and servers come by with various roasted meats on a stick and then carve off portions for you.

The genius of the churrascaria is the massive salad bar that you get before the meat comes along, which fills you up, so you don’t eat too much expensive meat.
But we had this one family (mom, dad, six kids) that had figured out ‘the system’ (their exact words) and would just sit at their table waiting for the meat. Everyone hated them because they would always ask for more portions than you were supposed to give at a single time, and would always smirk and say, ‘Yeah, we know the system. We know what you guys are doing. Just give us the meat.’ And then they’d proceed to eat an absolutely epic amount of meat.

They particularly targeted the more expensive cuts like picanha and tenderloin and avoided the less expensive stuff like chicken. The managers had an on-going war with them, but – infuriatingly – never kicked them out.

So yeah, a family of eight, eating nothing but hundreds of dollars worth of chargrilled meats every few days.

I wonder how their house smelled.” hairybrains

13. He Literally Wanted Everything In His Sandwich

“Not technically buffet, but I feel he kind of violated the rules to make it a buffet…

Local eccentric walks in. I can’t remember what sandwich he ordered, but the crucial part was that he wanted everything on it.

Now maybe that’s not absurd, you think. Who doesn’t like a bevy of veggies on their sandwich for free, right?
But this guy literally wanted everything. Every cheese, all of 3 or 4 kinds of peppers, guac, salsa, and every single sauce: ranch, mayo, oil and vinegar, bbq sauce; literally everything on display went into his sandwich. It just became a pool of sloppy liquid bathing floating vegetables in a soggy bread shell. The sandwich ‘artist’ (as they go by) could not even close or wrap the sandwich up.

The guy proceeds to take it to his booth, where he didn’t eat it like any normal person would eat a sandwich (why would he, it’s not even a sandwich anymore), but he scooped out all the drippy innards in his hands and globbed in all in his mouth like a living ******* mess and was thoroughly licking his fingers clean in between each hearty scoop of ranch/mayo/bbq/pickle/pepper/onion fistful.

That was the worst thing I’d seen in the realm of an eatery.” Artifex_Nox

12. They Took A Large Plate Of Cream Puffs Just To Eat The Cream

“I noticed the plump couple near us each obtained a heaping plate of cream puffs. I mean ALL of the puffs. Both 12” plates neatly stacked as if to be served at… an all you can eat buffet… Now, no normal person could eat all this, especially after an assumed 3 main courses, but these winners had a plan.

They proceeded to suck the cream from each puff, discarding the carrier pastry on another plate, each crumpled and squeezed like old toothpaste.

Of course, you would hide the evidence right? Nope. Left their table looking like competitive eating took place. As an artful centerpiece, the once-neat stack was now a disgusting pile of creamless puffs overflowing from a single plate.” Onlypostwhenangry
11. He Put Soy Sauce In His Soda

“At a Chinese Buffet a few months back.

This big dude was at a booth with his mom (and he was probably middle-aged or older). Green hair, tank top. You can imagine his smell.

I look over and see him with his half-full glass of fountain pop (something orange, I think FANTA), and he proceeds to take the soy sauce bottle and start pouring it into the pop.

And not just a drizzle, which would have been odd enough, but he fills up the rest of that cup and stirs it up with his chopstick. What I thought may have just a weird way to waste the restaurant’s resources before leaving turned out to be his next meal. He sat there and drank that whole d*mn thing.
It was the weirdest thing I ever saw at a buffet.” SudoDarkKnight

10. He’d Eat And Vomit Until He Passed Out From Dehydration

“Not me, but one of my best mates told me this one. Basically, he worked at a typical buffet restaurant. Some monstrously huge man comes in and stacks his plate sky high.

My friend estimates it would’ve weighed eight pounds.

So, the fat dude tucks in hard and cleans it up. Goes back and does it again. He does this three or four times before he goes to the bathroom. Comes back and gets right back to business, just eating pound and pounds of food (spaghetti, chicken, fries etc). Again, he goes to the bathroom and again, he comes back and eats some more.
After his fourth bathroom trip, he doesn’t come out. It’s been like 15 minutes, and the staff is wondering what’s happened to this dude. They go in to check and find him passed out in the cubicle.

The restaurant immediately calls an ambulance.

Turns out he’d been eating, vomiting and then eating again. This time around, though, he’d dehydrated himself to the point of passing out because he’d spewed out all the fluids in his body. Basically, he wasn’t drinking anything with his meals so he could eat more food.

An eating disorder of truly first-world proportions.” Reddit user

9. She Demanded Unlimited Milk Refills

“I worked at a Sunday buffet in high school (late 90’s). It was $7 a person. I could tell you some stories.
We essentially charged customers, brought drinks, then bussed the table. My favorite was the 400 lb.

lady who would come in by herself, ask for four glasses of milk, and wave you down whenever she finished one for a refill. She would eat about five plates of our macaroni and cheese (probably the worst thing on the buffet), and at some point, slam all four glasses of milk, then proceed to puke milk, cheese, and noodles all over the bathroom.

She would then sit and drink milk and eat macaroni for another hour or two, then leave a hand full of change for the tip. We all drew straws whenever she came in for who got to clean up the mess.

One day she came in and I only gave her one milk. She said she wanted four, and I assured her I would bring another one when she was finished with the first, she insisted, ‘The rules say I get as much milk as I want!’ There were no posted rules. I refused and ended up getting written up for not being hospitable.

From that point on, I would just drop a gallon of milk on her table every time she came in (which she usually finished) but refused to clean up the puke mess. Whenever my boss tried to get me to do it in her passive-aggressive way, I’d say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t offer unlimited milk refills if people are just going to puke it all over the bathroom every week.'” PaperStreetSoap
8. Customers Yelled At Me For Trying To Leave The Carving Station After I Got Cut

It’s amazing how selfish and unempathetic some people are.

“Worked at an Old Country Buffet. They have a carving station, which I was NEVER trained on. They threw me on a busy weekend night and just gave me a rough estimate of how thick the meat should be (the thickness of a dime -what the **** lol). They never gave me safety gloves to keep me from cutting myself. Just made me put on latex gloves and handed me these giant knives.
There’s a bunch of entitled old people waiting for their slices of meat, and I ******* knick myself with one of the d*mn knives. I go to set the knives down to try and take care of the issue because I’m not about to **** all this **** all the way up.

I IMMEDIATELY start getting yelled at by the customers and my boss nearby for trying to leave the carving station. No excuses allowed. So, I finish serving meat to these people with a bleeding finger and a cut open glove also using the same knife that knicked me.
Didn’t feel bad at all, honestly. Buffet customers are some of the most entitled people I’ve ever met. The nicest customers I ever got were the busses of Asian tourists. They were always so sweet.” Toadstool_Daydreams

7. All Heck Broke Loose When I Called The Janitor To Clean Up Her Vomit

“I managed a buffet in a casino in Reno for a few months.

Had this family come in: mom, dad, two little kids. I get called over to the table because the mom had thrown up on her plate/table and wanted us to take it away and clean it up.

I asked if she was ok, and she said she always throws up when she eats cheese. She had gotten herself an enchilada (it was Mexican-themed night). ***, lady, enchiladas pretty much always have cheese. I told her I would have to call janitorial because none of my staff was trained to handle biohazards. She ‘didn’t understand why I couldn’t just take it.’ Janitorial came in and couldn’t clean up because she refused to move from the table.

So, the janitorial left.
She calls me back over and starts yelling at me. Dad starts yelling too. Apparently she wanted to keep eating after throwing up, which I thought was really gross. I had them sit at another table, so they could all keep eating. Janitorial came back and cleaned the other table.
Finally, they go to leave and decide to make a huge scene in front of the whole restaurant and demand their money back. I refuse. Dad gets in my face and starts shouting that I’m just a racist, white ***** and his wife makes loads more money than I do.

I call security, and they storm out, pulling pictures off the wall and shattering them on the floor, and dad also picked up a vase and broke it. The two kids are running around and banging on the walls. Security finally shows up after they ran off. I have to do a report, and they were put on the ‘never return’ list.” release_the_hound
Another User Comments:

“Do people like that conspire or something beforehand? ‘Hey, you know how they didn’t clean up my puke immediately? Let’s go up to the register, freak the **** out and bully everyone until we don’t have to pay.'” SugarPantsJif

6. They’d Come In, Binge Eat, Then Purge

“In my high school years, I worked for a place that had an unlimited salad bar.

Each night like clockwork, these two older skinny women would come in and pig out on salad. After 15 minutes, they’d go to the ladies’ room and barf it all up. Then they’d go load up at the salad bar again. This rinse-repeat cycle would go on 6 or 7 times. We called them the ‘Salad Bar Twins.’ Eventually, the manager got tired of them freaking out the other patrons and asked them not to come back.
From buddies that worked at other local restaurants, I found out that they went to all the establishments that offered an all-you-can-eat option. They had different nicknames at each place: the ‘Bulimia B*********,’ ‘Puke Patrol,’ ‘Hurler Hags,’ etc.

I guess it wasn’t gluttony as much as mental illness.” Tuna_Sushi

5. They Threw A Tantrum When We Refused To Give Them More Crab Legs

“My parents owned an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I was there every day of my life from 4 to 14.

My favorite horror story is when a couple came in to eat (obviously). They loveeed the crab legs and every time my mom put some out, they took it ALL. Also, just a reminder, crab legs are expensive! Forget the other customers, they just took it and ate it all.
So they’re there for maybe 2 hours now, and it’s getting dark.

They’ve eaten through at least a week’s stock of crab legs, and my mom finally decides it’s enough. She stops putting it out in the buffet and brings individual plates to the customers who wanted it but couldn’t get any due to this couple.

The couple is angry. They literally flipped the chairs at their table, flipped their plates, bowls, cups, etc. and completely trashed their area. Food was all over the floor, table, chairs. Sticky soda was dripping into the carpet. They left in a hurry, but someone caught their license plate. We called the cops, and I think they said they charged them with something? I can’t remember the aftermath details clearly, because I was probably 8- or 9-years-old (20 now).

I just remember looking at the mess and feeling really angry that my sister and I had to clean it up with our mom. It was a family run business, so we didn’t have much help.
Anyways, that’s my horror story. The end.” blooberries1

4. It’s Like He Purposely Missed The Toilet

“When I was 15, I worked as a busboy at an all you can eat buffet. While working one afternoon, with hardly anyone in the restaurant, this family of four, all morbidly obese and looking like they have not showered for a week, come in and proceed to stuff their faces, as one would expect.

As a busboy, one of our jobs was to check washrooms every hour. Just as I am walking to check the men’s washroom, one of the sons from this family is leaving the washroom with the BIGGEST grin I have ever seen on his pudgy face (still haunts me 14 years later). Upon seeing this, I immediately have a bad feeling about what I am about to witness.
Sure enough, the first stall I check has a MASSIVE amount of explosive diarrhea splattered all over the toilet tank, the wall, and the floor. There is literally *** everywhere but the toilet bowl! It looks like someone let off a bomb made of *** on the toilet seat.

I grab some tongs and paper towels and tried to clean it up, but there is just too much ***, so I go to my manager to show him. He’s a bit of a hard a**, but one look at this mess and he closes the stall and tells me that I don’t get paid enough to clean this up and that the night janitor will clean it up. I still feel really, really bad for the guy that had to clean it up…” joecarter93
3. She Got So Much Food From The Buffet That She Couldn’t Use Her Wheelchair

“Worked at a casino buffet in the south.

I worked at the steak station, so I served a lot of rare steaks.

A giant woman in a wheelchair rolls up and picks her steak. I put it on the griddle for about 8 seconds on each side and she asks for it on the plate. She went to leave but had two plates on her lap and a plate in each hand, so she couldn’t wheel herself back.

She called for her mullet-sporting son to come wheel her back to the table. He was wearing a shirt with Dale Earnhardt’s number that said ‘God needed a driver.’
The south is something else.” Reddit user

2. He Took Ridiculous Amounts Of Food Home

This is why most buffets don’t allow to-go orders.

“I used to work at a Pizza Hut which served buffet at lunch. We had a rule that employees could take from the buffet at the end of a shift. One time, we had a new guy join who my manager really disliked. The manager was notoriously horrible to everyone, and you could tell right away that she had it in for the new guy. He was effeminate, sassy, and acted like he owned the place.

Anyway, the end of his four-hour shift comes during peak lunch when every new pizza that comes out is immediately pecked apart by the customers.
The manager hands him a box, flashes him one of those hate-smiles and says, ‘Help yourself to the buffet my dear.’ He strolls up not to the buffet, but to the cutting table and slides two whole fresh pizzas into his box then waltzes out.

He didn’t come back in.

All the customers and the manager were fuming, but the staff were in stitches.” Tangocon

1. She Didn’t Thank Me After I Saved Her From Choking

“I was once the bartender at a hotel that had a ‘smorgasbord’ all-you-can-eat buffet. A waitress ran into the bar and asked me to help her with a guest. When I ran into the dining room, an enormous lady was gasping and wheezing at her table for one. She must have been 300 pounds-plus and was choking on some food.
I reached around from behind her, lifted her up, and performed a Heimlich maneuver on her.

She heaved and spat out a huge chunk of half-chewed chicken right onto the carpet.

She promptly sat down, took a few breaths, and went back to shoveling food into her mouth without so much of a ‘thank you.’

I went back to the bar, and watched her eat for another hour. She tipped the waitress a dollar.” pizzaforce3

Reading these stories from buffet workers’ perspectives is an eye-opener for those who love buffets and all-you-can-eats. Sometimes when we’re given the luxury of self-service, we think, “I’m paying, so I should be getting my money’s worth,” while in a buffet staff member’s head, they might be thinking, “We won’t be making any profit if this customer keeps gorging on our food.” Even if you’re serving your own food at a wedding, work potluck, birthday party, baby shower, or other gathering for free, someone had to pay for the food, so to pig out, trash the place with leftovers, or to purge on the floor only to continue eating is certainly rude.

I think we can all learn a little lesson from these stories, whether we’re at a buffet or working at one!