A veteran Taco Bell worker of 20 years says he quit because customers have gotten so 'unreasonable' and hard to deal with

• A Taco Bell manager is leaving after 20 years for a non-food service job.

• He says customers have gotten more demanding and abusive since the pandemic started.

• Workers are also burnt out and pushed to their limits, he says.

After 20 years of working at Taco Bell, a worker told Insider that he's leaving because customers have gotten too difficult in the past year.

The worker, whose employment was confirmed by Insider and who asked to remain anonymous for fears of impacting his future employment, has been in the fast-food industry for years, putting in six years at McDonald's before his two-decade career at Taco Bell.

"Fast food is pretty much the only thing I've ever known," he told Insider. If customers hadn't become so unreasonable and angry, "I probably would've just kept doing what I was doing. I loved my job until Covid hit."

The employee says that things have gotten especially bad since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Customers have become more critical and angry towards workers in the service industry, and suddenly "people think it's perfectly okay to be intolerant, demand things, and just be unreasonable," he said, to the point where his work is "almost untenable."