You’ve seen them, they proliferate the convenience stores: soda kipers. It doesn’t matter if they’re buying small, medium, or ‘industrial drum with straw’ sized soda, they fill the cup, stuff in a straw, guzzle, and refill. If you do this, you’re a thief!
Try taking a swallow of beer from your pint glass and asking Mr. Bartender to top it off, gratis. Odds are, your ass will soon meet Mr. Sidewalk.
Before anyone gripes, I’m not talking about letting the fizz settle so you get a true 12, 24, 64, or MC306 tanker of soda. I’m pitting the asshole thieves who fill a cup, drink a bit, and then refill.
Worse yet are the legions of little kids who have been inculcated to the process by their parents. Dunno about you, but my Mom or Dad would have slapped me into next Thursday for such an act.
Think this is a minor beef? Put yourself in the shoes of the corner convenience store owner. Calculate a tiny amount of theft committed by a fair measure of customers, and see what profit you’ve at year end.
Well, first, they shouldn’t be guzzling it down, but a sip or two is fine, if they’re slurping off the excess foam or just trying to unparch a throat.
Second, it depends on the convenience store. A lot of store owners don’t bother being annoyed by it because it’s such a small loss - they’ve got bigger things to worry about, like those kids stealing Snickers or something.
But yeah - my parents probably wouldn’t have let me drink the entire thing down and then refill it. Not cool. That’s expected at a fast food restaurant, where you get free refills. There’s no free refill sign at the convenience store, and for a reason.
I’ve never sipped and refilled, but I have taken a draw or two while at the cash register and been unpleasantly surprised to receive a mouthful of carbonated water with little-to-no flavor, as the syrup has run out. Perhaps your soda stealers have been bitten once too often by this unexpected flavorless beverage?
(ok, I know that wouldn’t account for GUZZLING and refilling, but eh…)
Whatever it costs, it’s obviously less than the pay + benefits would cost for an employee to makes the drinks for people so they couldn’t access the machine themselves. It that weren’t the case, then believe me, soda jerks would still be around. It’s kind of riduculous to call people who take $0.20 worth of soda “thieves” when the only reason they’re getting their own drink is so the store can cut staff and pad its bottom line. The business has factored this cost into its business model.
What kills me is when people do this and think they are somehow getting one over on “The Man.” Uh, Earth to nimrods, the soda already has a 500% (or thereabouts, this is a WAG) markup. You’d probably have to drink half a dozen cups before the store lost any money.
Lizard, who occasionally still works in a convenience store.
If it’s a fast food joint, and they want me to serve my drink myself, I get free refills. If they didn’t want me to get free refills, they’d keep the drink behind the counter. Or post a sign.
Are you fucking serious? So, most people get ice with their soda, right? More ice = less soda.
So what if I got say two little chunks of ice and filled my 64 oz big gulp up to the rim.
Am I stealing too? Because I got almost ALL soda! Og ferbid! Believe me, filling up the cup with very little ice gives people waay more soda than the “thieves” who drink some and refill.
How many of these soda thieves fill up a cup and slam say 30 ounces of soda before they refill it?
The places I get my fountain drinks have any size for 69 cents. I get the larger size 32ounce fill it then drink some down and fill it again. In your book that is stealing I guess even though I’m taking alot less product then when I brink in my 44 ounce mug to fill. When the owner is in he won’t take my money. He just says your all set. I’ve known him for some time.
My take is if I have to fill the cup myself it is free refills as long as I’m in the establishment. If a store owner is truely concerned they’d have the soda fountain behind the counter.
I’ve never found a place that lets you serve your own beer in the same fashion.
Fountain drinks have such a high profit/volume ratio that owners could almost ignore kids playing with the machines and squirting cola. The expense is minimal, no matter the quantity.
A guy loitering by the fountain all day would be annoying and eventualy a problem, but that’s usually not the case.
If you approached the owner of such a store and told him/her that several hundred ounces of beverages were being dispensed and not paid for, chances are that they would not care. It’s figured into allowable losses.
And this Pitting receives a disappointing 1.7 from the judges, and I’m hearing over the earpiece here that 1.5 points of that are for the OP managing to spell their name correctly at the top of the post…
Seriously, what the smeg are you on about?
Have you ever taken more than one toothpick from the holder at the counter in a restaurant? Ever had more than one mint from the complimentary mint jar?
As someone else said, people filling their Monsoon Bucket sized cup with soft drink and having a mouthful or two before refilling it are factored into the cost by the retailer.
When I worked at a theme park, they paid AUD$7.15 for a 5 litre bladder of Coca-Cola syrup, which was then hooked into the post-mix system and diluted at something like a 25:1 Water/Coke ratio (I forget the exact figure). To cut a long story short, you could get something in the order of 500 cups (250ml) out of ONE bladder of Coke syrup, which meant that the actual paper cups cost more than the drink they contained.
I fill my cup part of the way and take a good swig so that I know the quality of the beverage I am buying, kind of like always sniffing milk before pouring.
QC isn’t always the highest at the local 7-11, so I want to know if their mix is off before I walk off with a cup of syrup or plain carbonated water. That’s it.
Occasionally, it’s hard to restrain myself and I drink a few more swallows. This is usually after yard work or a long run, such as yesterday afternoon.
OP does have a point that it’s theft despite what the business models might take into account. Presumably armoured car companys have it figured into their business model account that from time to time one of their cars is going to get jacked.
I don’t think either the horrendous mark up on the drinks justifys stealing them. Theft is theft Albeit I find it hard to have much outrage or sympathy for the ‘poor’ shop keepers.
My biggest gripe with soft drink dispensers is that they are set up so it’s almost impossible to actually get the cup filled with liquid. If I buy a 500ml cup of drink I expect to be receiving 500mls of liquid. Not 100mls of drink and 400mls of foam when the drink fizzes up in the cup. It usually takes a few goes of standing there letting the foam die down, topping up, foaming, dying down filling up etc before you can actually get your full 500mls. I think they rely on people being too pressurised by people in the que to actually ensure they get their full cup of soft drinks.
The amount of ice they add when they serve you soft drinks is another gripe of mine. I’ve started asking for no ice. A cup 3/4 filled with ice. What the fuck do I look like a thirsty polar bear. Don’t the mindless morons who work in fast food places realise that ice is water not diet coke or fanta. If I want a cup of ice with some fanta I’ll ask for ‘A cup of ice with a dash of fanta’. The drinks are diluted already without further diluting it also frequently cooled even without ice.
Perhaps they are attempting to utilise the homepathic concept of ‘memory of water’. Personally I suspect some suit somewhere worked out it was marginally cheaper to fill the cup with ice and a dash of diluted fanta than to fill it with fanta.
If you walked into a jewller, picked up 10 gold coins and put them in a bag then swallowed two of the coins from the bag then put two silver coins into the bag and then paid for 10 Gold Coins wouldn’t you consider that theft?
Why the difference then when the goods have a lower value. If you don’t consider that theft then I’d like to buy some Gold Coins from you.
The last time I checked, cups of soft drink were not exchangable as currency, suitable for use in various hi-tech applications, or renowned for their beauty as jewellery or objet d’art.
And if I knew you were going to steal some of my gold coins, I’d charge you more for the whole package to cover my losses…
BTW, does your keyboard have a key with a comma on it?
dnooman is totally right when he (she?) says that the cost of sugar and water is incredibly cheap. I think you work in fast food, right? Well then you know how strictly management enforces the cup rule: no one gets free regular cups, all cups must be counted, etc. etc. Not only is this pretty much the only way to get an accurate inventory, but the cups themselves are worth a whole lot more than the soda.
Also, as an anecdote, I was once at a cafe in a zoo. My sister and I were the only ones in there after the guy who was eating left, and it took forty minutes for the food to arrive. We kept complaining to the person who took our order (who was just standing around after she took the order), but she wasn’t making the food so she didn’t care. The only thing she cared about is when we dared to refill our cups. It was a fountain we had to fill ourselves, and she dared to chastise us for finishing our beverage and wanting more during our wait. She got an earful from me, but there was no manager and our food arrived while I was chewing her out, so we pretty much left it alone.
I agree with the suggestion that if you had to fill the cup, you get the refill. It’s sort of rude to down the thing in one gulp while standing there, but it doesn’t seem wrong.
Also, if you watch PBS without making a pledge, you’re a thief! A common thief!
I tend to take a small quantity of soda and taste it before filling my cup, because as Garfield pointed out, sometimes the syrup is low. Keener that I am, I often report this to the counter slaves.
This thread reminds me of the time I was really jonesing for some Gold Coins so I stopped at a convenience jewller. Like most places these days it was self-serve, and when the bag was full I slurped a couple of coins off the top to keep the bag from running over. Unfortunately, I could taste that even though they weren’t labeled as such, they were Canadian. I dumped the bag and refilled with Silver Coins, which I wouldn’t have stopped for in the first place, but I figured I had already used the bag. When I went to pay, the cashier gave me a hard time because he noticed that I inadvertently had two bags stuck together, and he said that bags were inventory or something. Jerk.
