Domino’s customer calls to complain about Alfredo pasta. Then he gets blacklisted: ‘I was a driver in Tennessee’

From nagging customers to occasional slip-ups, the food service industry can lead to a few gray hairs. But most employees expect a day or two with heightened anxiety here and there—not a siege.

One Domino's manager, however, experienced something so egregious that whenever she discusses it, people ask why she didn't call the police.

The context

Rae (@definitelynot.rae) said that she was promoted to be a Domino's manager when she was 18 or 19 years old. That led her to gather some “crazy stories.” She shared one story in a video that received more than 2,000 views on TikTok.

Rae told her audience about a repeat customer who rattled her. According to her, a man would order one or two Alfredo pastas from Domino's regularly. But without fail, he would call the store to complain about the order.

Every single time he ordered, a call would come. But Rae said that corporate did not like going above a certain measurement for the Alfredo pasta. According to her, each order had to have around 4 ounces of sauce, 5.5 ounces of noodles, and 2 ounces of chicken.

An imbalance of ingredients, she said, could lead to the order not cooking correctly. So she wasn't able to accommodate his request. Despite this, he often complained so much that she and other employees recognized his phone number.

The repeat customer

At first, Rae would send the customer remakes of his order. But the man would still complain about the remakes and scream at her on the phone. At some point, Rae reported his phone number and information to Domino's. After some time, he was finally banned from making online and phone delivery orders.

Rae wasn't notified that he was banned. Rather, he called one day, and his number was  “grayed out.” The man said he had tried to place an order online, but it didn't go through. So he decided to place an order on the phone. Rae had to tell him he could no longer place delivery orders.

“ Being the nice person I am, I told him, ‘Sir, I'm so sorry. I can't send you delivery. If you'd like, you could come pick it up.' And he didn't like that,” Rae said.

The man asked multiple times why he could no longer get delivery. She then explained that it “must have been an altercation in the past,” as the man had verbally harassed several drivers. She then reiterated that the man could only come in-person for orders from then on. That's when he started cursing at her.

The end of the phone call

Rae said the man called her “[expletive] stupid.” He asked to speak to someone who “knows what they're doing.”

Frustrated, Rae said that she was the only person at the store. She hung up the phone.

After that point, Rae said the man called the Domino's location 15 different times. Every time, Rae said he sounded angrier on the phone. Rae tried to explain over the course of numerous calls that he simply couldn't make an online or phone order anymore. But that didn't stop him.

“ Eventually, it got to the point where… He would call, I'd pick it up, hang up immediately because I knew that he was just gonna scream,” she said. “And he'd call back immediately, I'd pick it up, hang it up, pick it up, hang it up, pick it up, hang it up.”

Rae tried to ask the man to stop calling the store; the man responded by threatening to assault her.

“ I just [held] the phone here, speechless, listening to this man threaten to come in and … assault me. Over and over, over and over he's screaming, ‘I'm gonna come in there and make you suck my…'” she said.

Rae said she spent the rest of her shift terrified that something would happen to her. So she closed the store an hour early that day. Unfortunately, she told her audience that he called again after that encounter.

@definitelynot.rae TTI was threatened by a customer at dominos #fyp #dominos ♬ original sound – rae

A PSA about employee safety

Rae told her audience she realized she should have called the police.

“I  don't know. There were several times when, looking back, I 100% should have called the cops on whoever it was that was losing their [expletive] on me,” she said. “But I never did. Like, I just kinda let it go.”

But commenters had another question. Why couldn't the store fully block his phone number?

“Is there not a way to block [customers'] phone numbers?” one viewer asked. Rae answered, “Not at the [in-store] level sadly.”

That led some to criticize Domino's corporate team.

“The problem with corporate is that they don't care and will let customers walk over you… [Even] if we never did anything wrong, all it takes is for them to say that you're rude and they put us at fault,” a viewer said.

Abuse in the hospitality industry

Rae isn't the only Domino's employee to face abuse in the workplace. Some other employees have shared similar experiences on discussion platforms such as Reddit.

In one thread, a person who said they worked at Domino's stated that they had food thrown at them during a regular delivery. That led to the customer getting blacklisted from ordering again. Another commenter claimed that a customer answered the door completely naked, leading the store to blacklist the number.

Outside of pizza chains, abuse of hospitality workers remains a relevant part of the industry, with many workers experiencing general incivility, verbal and physical aggression, and sexual harassment. The issue, it seems, continues to rage on today. Servers, bartenders, and food service workers regularly share horror stories online for others to dissect.

Buzz News reached out to Rae via TikTok direct message and Domino's via email for comment.