‘Call my police on me on my island’: Hawaiian gets the better of a tetchy tourist when she teaches them a much-needed lesson in patience

There are quite a few things in life that truly get on our nerves. People walking too slowly on the sidewalk, cars taking up more than one parking space, and don’t even get me started on those who can’t, for the life of them, chew with their mouths closed.

But I have to say, these annoying moments are all secondary compared to the downright audacity some tourists display. TikTok user Kira (@th333baddest) knows exactly what I mean. In a video posted on the platform, Kira shared her experience dealing with an entitled tourist visiting her home island of Waikiki. While we don’t know what triggered the altercation, we see a very angry tourist (read: Karen) threatening to call the police on Kira, to which the TikTok user immediately responds, “I hope you do because you are rude and impatient.”

The Hawaiian native calls out the tourist’s rude behavior by saying, “Understand patience. Learn patience for workers. You are just impatient.” As the Karen — oops, sorry, tourist — continues to argue with the Hawaiian worker, apparently threatening to call the police over an order that took too long, Kira says, “Call the police for being impatient. Call my police on me, on my island,” and finishes with a straightforward, “Go home.”

Comments responding to the video are full of people taking Kira’s side, with quite a few blasting the customer for “being this stressed about your d*mn order in Waikiki.” No one likes a Karen, that much is abundantly clear, and everyone knows Hawaii is getting absolutely flooded with tourism — to a fault. In a 2023 article from Business Insider, journalist Poojah Shaa described her experience as a Hawaiian local, dealing with a mass influx of tourists and the gentrification of the islands.

In the article, she explains that locals and natives have been displaced in favor of American tourists who wield greater economic power, driving up home prices due to increased demand. A study conducted by Arizona State University and Princeton University also showed that over-tourism is likely the main cause of coral reef degradation in Hawaii.

“I know these reefs extremely well, so I’m careful to not say correlation is causation,” explains Greg Asner, director of the ASU Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. “But there was a really strong correlation – even I was impressed.” Clearly, while tourism is great for the economy of the Hawaiian islands, too much of it is clearly terrible for everything else, including the residents who have to deal with these Karens on a daily basis.