Sometimes time is not on our side, and one woman was reminded of it recently after pulling up to a drive-thru just after a restaurant’s closing. Her tantrum has now gained notoriety online.
TikTok user Yolanda (@lionessyolanda7) recently posted a video showing her picking up her 16-year-old child from work one night and discovering an angry woman at the drive-thru. The video has more than 3 million views as of Wednesday evening. In the video, it’s not clear what the name of the restaurant is.
“As I was picking up my 16-year-old from work tonight, a raging Karen pulled up still wanting service after the restaurant was closed,” Yolanda wrote as part of her video.
A “Karen” has become a shorthand way to describe a white woman who acts out in certain predicaments, sometimes using their privilege to sway opinion.
In Yolanda’s video, the woman at the drive-thru can be seen repeatedly honking her horn and yelling as her dog barks in the backseat of her car. The woman screams out that she arrived at 9pm when the restaurant was still considered open, she said.
“We ain’t got time for the Karen because I am a Claudette,” Yolanda said in her video.
The Daily Dot reached out to Yolanda via TikTok direct message for further comment. There are certain customs when it comes to arriving at a restaurant on the verge of closing for the day.
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For restaurant service workers, showing up right before a restaurant is closing is not a best practice because of how a restaurant functions. According to the website Takeout, in most restaurants, the front-of-house staff—like servers and bartenders—is the first to leave, but back-of-house workers like cooks and dishwashers could stay well beyond closing to prepare for the following day.
“Restaurants don’t close the way an office might—we don’t flip that sign to ‘closed’ and all march out the door when the clock hits 11,” advice columnist the Salty Waitress writes.
The rise of the term Karen started around 2020 when viral incidents, usually escalated by white women, dominated news headlines. In one instance, a white woman confronted a Black man in Central Park who was bird-watching. During the incident, the woman said she would tell the police that “there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” after the man asked her to put her dog on a leash.
Commenters on Yolanda’s post were critical of people who decide to show up at restaurants last minute.
“[It] boggles my mind that people are like this, like do you think behavior like that is gonna make them reopen for you?” user @ax2_99 said.
“You can’t help some folks… in 2020, my store closed early and [we] had three separate signs stating we were closing early, the times, etc,” user Honey Bee (@mostlurkingnwatchin) said. “A couple still sat at our window for 30-plus [minutes because] we were inside.”