We're always encouraging the stealing of ideas from other operations. It helps operators do their jobs better. However, everyone has a good story about customers who try the other kind of stealing—the bad kind. It's one of my favorite questions to ask operators because each one has experience with it and most of the stories are highly entertaining. Since we love a good story, we are starting a new, fun monthly column on the Editors' Blog called Stealing Stories. We want to hear your funniest/most creative stories about a time when customers got crafty when trying to steal from your operation. To submit a story, email me at lramsey@cspnet.com.
To get things started here are some tales from the man who gave us the idea for the column, Salvatore Cantalupo, corporate chef for Corporate Image Dining Services in Stamford, Conn.
"Probably one of the best stories I have was we had a customer come in, grab a bag of chips, open it and walk around the café like he was deciding to order. He would eat the whole bag of chips and then throw the bag out, like the chips where complimentary while he was deciding what to eat. He did this for awhile before we realized it.
Another one was we had a customer who would grab an oatmeal and only fill it halfway. Then he'd go over to the fruit bar and fill the rest with fruit, knowing that the fruit had to be weighed and oatmeal is charged by container."