As for the Keurig machine, I don’t see why you’d care if others use your machine, as long as they bring their own pods. So why doesn’t your group just keep the pods in your desks and bring them with you when you want a cup of coffee? If someone else wants to use your machine, they can bring their own.
No sign will stop a thief. IME the bulk of these problems aren’t thieves, but folks that assume without thinking that anything out in the open is actually for public use. Especially in a company where there actually is free food and drink nearby this is not a wildly unreasonable assumption.
Given that, it seems to me the sign shouldn’t say “BI group only” It should say “For food club members only; see Bob @ cubicle 1234 to join.” That stops the assumers without being pissy.
Maybe you could put some sort of cover over the items, so it’s not obvious to outsiders that they are there.
I still remember the P.O.S. Boss (That’s not Point Of Service, if you were curious) Who Encouraged the [del]Ex-Cons[/del] people on his team to send building wide email stating,
“Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! I just ate any food I felt like left in the common fridge. Yum! And if you want to say JACK about it, I’ll be in Park Lot 5 behind the building at 6PM.”
“Chris” was a “Special” Boss that got off trying to make his people ‘pit-fight’ behind the building after work.
Lets just say say NONE of us felt badly when he knelt on one knee to ask his “Philly Girl” to marry him. It wasn’t a surprise to us when she took the ring, laughed in his face, and walked out… we All Knew he deserved it… And More… In Spades.
I saw him a few months after I quit to get a better job. He tried to play up to this new one saying loudly, “Shhhh. That’s that guy I had to fire.” :smack: :dubious:
No, “Chris”. I resigned… and to Your Boss, because you couldn’t be trusted. And if I was laughing to my kid as I walked away, the joke was, "I wonder how many Carots this one was going to spit in his face and take him for… " 
Does this cubicle have locking drawers or overheads? Put the food in there, stash the keys where the group can get them easily without interrupting. (“Keys are kept on the magnetic hook just inside Cube 1 and Cube 4”) Keep your food and coffee pods locked up. You might also start storing some items in there that make it obvious that this is YOUR group and not just a cube anyone can wander into. “Group 6 High Tea and Whooppee Parlor Area; No dogs allowed” Or something.
Wait, there is coffee provided in the break room and they still steal yours?
Is it because you have a Keurig?
mmm
I assume so. They are kind of novelty until you use it a few times. We’ve started locking up supplies now, so it’s not quite so easy.
There is one guy who just doesn’t understand unwritten rules of conduct. He has, on multiple occasions, followed our IT support guy into the bathroom to ask him questions. 
This is also a guy who comes into our area and brazenly take food in front of us. He’ll throw out an offhanded “do you mind if I have a few of these?” while digging in on some homemade Christmas candy. On that last one, I said “No, but you may have one.” He didn’t get the hint that we are not his personal food supplier. Sigh
Heh. Ours was “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please be neat and wipe the seat”. When that didn’t work, the VP took to going in rightafteryoucameout and inspecting the seats. Of course the person doing it (which we all knew) was the weirdo pet the VP herself had hired. :smack:
What clever and witty folks you work with. That there is real poetry.
mmm
We did this at my former employer. Several of us on a team chipped in for a Keurig. Some other people from other teams also kicked in some money when they found out we’d bought it, which was nice. The rule was, BYOP (bring your own pods) (and sugar/cream/creamer), and refill the reservoir when it’s low. It worked nicely.
Get some power bars, extension cords, etc, and rig up your machine in a mass of confusing wiring, the power bar actually controlling the coffee maker, cleverly concealed, but easily accessed to turn on. Possibly attached to the underside of the desk surface? Pile lots of stuff around so it’s not easy to poke around without making some noise etc.
Lock the spoons, condiments, pods and other ‘group only’ use items into the drawers and cupboards. Hide the key in/on/under something only the group knows of.
Now everbody who needs access has it all easily at hand. And those who should not have been helping themselves find it’s gotten kinda hard to do. And, all the while, appearance wise, not a thing has changed.
Sign Idea 1
“Are you in our group? No?
Did you bring this in? No?
Then it isn’t yours!”
Sign Idea 2
“Thank you for participating in our study.
The treats on display for the past two months
were pulled from the dumpster behind Dunkin Donuts
and treated with a new Industrial Insecticide to test
if it can be used to reverse the process of food spoilage.
If you did participate in our study, please forward us
any side effects you have, or may experience in the
next six months.”
I think this happens at every company. I share an office with a few other people (office, as in, behind a door) and we sometimes have food in here. I absolutely don’t mind if friends or even acquaintances come in and chat and have a bite. But there are definitely people that no one in here even knows who will wander in and help themselves.
Heh. By “ours” I mean foisted on us by this hideous VP. :rolleyes:
OK, I’m gonna get a mod warning for this, but that last bit tells me you’re a liar 
More seriously: did people actually bother to refill the reservoir? If so, I’m truly amazed. I’m not a coffee drinker but I had always thought that there was a long-standing tradition of people avoiding taking the last bit from the Mister Coffee so they could plausibly claim they hadn’t emptied and therefore didn’t need to make a new pot. When I kept ice cube trays and a bin in the office freezer, people would pry a couple of cubes out of the tray if the bin was empty - quite literally NOBODY would bother to dump the cubes into the bin and refill the tray.
I’m not a coffee drinker, but there’s a coffee maker and a K-cup machine in the office, and I’ve witnessed people refilling both without bitching. I’ve made ice cubes and I’ve seen others do the same. So it can happen.
Of course, I’ve also worked in places where people would leave stuff in the fridge till it turned into a science project, or where food and change would disappear from desks, or where fruit would be left out and allowed to rot in the cubicle. I guess it’s all about the maturity of the group.
I think the Customer Service department’s was more clever:
“We aim to please, so you aim too, please!”
(No, not really, but I’ll take any excuse to resurrect that old joke.)
Our team supplies snacks for team members. Pretzels, granola, peanuts. Nothing all that ritzy, but we can work long hours and it’s appreciated.
We used to keep it out in an unoccupied cube. Things got to the point where that cube was included on tours for new hires: “here’s the snack cube”. People would come from other floors to help themselves. And they’d load up too: why make multiple trips, when you can take enough to feed your whole team.
So we put all of it in drawers, in another cubicle. It’s not that we minded sharing, as an occasional thing. It was that people got greedy and sucked us dry. “You guys have all the good snacks!” That’s great. Who are you again?
In the coffee situation, I would hide the k-cups. For the food, put that in someone’s cubicle rather than the open one, depending on what it is. If it can go into a drawer, do that. Out of sight, out of mind.