[Sorry for the late update today! And sorry it’s so short! I got really sick and fell asleep in the early evening and didn’t wake up until now >.<]
An askreddit question, “A driver complained about a rest stop welding an iron cage around their water faucet, and the rest stop claimed it was to prevent people from walking away with buckets of water. Is that a reasonable thing to do?”
The top reply is, “Every insane rule you find was forced into existence by an insane group of people.
Most large supermarkets have a bathroom inside. Can you guess why they stopped providing toilet paper?
It was a requirement during covid to provide hand sanitiser, and we welded a locked container for it that’s bolted to the walls too. Because people frequently stole the entire bottle of hand sanitiser.
We had to lock our water dispenser, or else charge 50 cents per cup of water, or else we’d go through four buckets of water every day.
We’ve had workers make tea right on top of a glass cabinet, and the cabinet got so hot it exploded.
We’ve repeatedly reminded them that glass objects have to be moved around by cart, not carried by hand. To put out only one row of red wine bottles on the shelves, no double rows, don’t do anything fancy with it, don’t stack it into a tower, and make sure there’s a safety fence. Nobody ever listens. And every year, some 7000-8000 RMB’s worth of glass goods get smashed.
An employee’s gym—what a great idea, right? 40 of our 50 dumbbells got stolen.
People would fuck in the gym at 1:30AM. It was all caught on security cameras and everything.
We reminded him to not do that again in the future.
He still did, but he brought a towel to cover up the security cameras. And when we warned him again, he said, “I don’t think it’s legal to have a security camera in here.”
I mean, even if it is illegal, it’s not as illegal as fucking in a public space, right?
If we have the AC on in the summer, people will come in here and lay down and sleep. It’s not that we don’t want them to sleep here, but we’re worried about grandmas and grandpas dying while they’re napping here and no one even finding out.
Some guy fell asleep on our meat counter, and then a knife fell on him. A big cleaver for cutting pork, the kind that slices through bone like butter. And we all hear a scream, “AHH AHHHHHH HELP!” And we all rush up and try to stop the bleeding and take him to the neighbouring hospital. Thank god we picked a location with a hospital right next door.
There’s always a pile of cardboard in the corner of the warehouse. If we check, there’s always people napping on top of it during work hours.
Several times, we’ve had people miss clocking off because they overslept, and woke up int he middle of the night in the warehouse and smashed through the door from the inside to get out. Or called people over in the middle of the night to let them out.
As soon as they clock in for work, they go to sleep in the warehouse, and nobody woke him up at dinner time or when it was time to leave for home.
We told that guy to leave and never come back.
And the next day, he still came in for his wages. We asked him what kind of work he even did. All he did was pass out in the warehouse all day.
It’s normal for a supermarket to lose several hundred RMB’s worth of goods every day. When it gets to the holidays, we’ve lost 2-3K in a day before. Especially in the autumn and winter.
You’ve seen empty toothpaste containers, right?
Because of the design of toothpaste, it’s super easy to steal. Just stuff it in your sleeves and nobody will notice.
We get 100, 200 tubes of toothpaste stolen every month. It’s particularly bad with students. We watch students extra hard as soon as they go to the toothpaste section. Normally, students come in with their parents to buy toothpaste. If they’re coming in by themselves, there’s definitely something up.
The same applies for snickers. Originally, we put it in the candy aisle with everything else.
And we didn’t manage to sell a single one before they were all stolen.
At that point, we started exclusively putting them right next to the cashier.
We only get to sell half of our pens. The rest get stolen. We buy these to stock at 50 cents, and don’t make any money if we don’t at least charge 1.50 RMB.
I mean, too much stuff get stolen. I won’t go on and on about it.
We’ve got a faucet near the entrance of our supermarket, that we use to clean the floors with. Every day, we lose several tons of water through it, until we finally locked it. And then guess what happened? Someone smashed the lock, dismantled the pipes, and got water from the second floor.
In the produce section, people’ll hide good fruit as it comes in and beat it up until it’s “defective”, and buy two pounds of fruit for 2 bucks.
We’ll run BOGO promotions on yogurt when they’re close to expiration date, and people always try to put the BOGO stickers on new yogurt.
They’ll clean vegetables right in the produce section, pulling off outer, wilted leaves they don’t want, and only weigh out and pay for what they take away.
For every ton of unpackaged, loose sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and peanuts we stock, we’ll lose about 200kg.
I’ve yelled at the time, “Stop eating these! We’ll have to close our doors if you keep eating them!”
And then I go into the warehouse, and our warehouse manager is there, snacking on sunflower seeds.
Wow, no wonder we’ve never been able to match up the warehouse’s stock and the supermarket’s stock for the last decade.
A lot of people get fish or meat, see the sticker on it, think it’s too expensive, and just leave it on a random shelf. Some get rotten to the point of growing maggots before anyone notices.
If they so much as left it in a freezer, I’d think they were good people.
We make birthday cakes in the bakery section, and a customer was carrying a cake towards the cashier when they dropped it accidentally. They just declared they don’t want the cake anymore and ran away. Couldn’t catch him and he won’t take our calls. The bakery guy called the cops.
The bakery section is the worst. A lot of people come to the supermarket because they just want some bread to snack on. So they’d buy some bread, package it up, then wander through the supermarket. And the more they wander, the more they want to get. But bread is cooked food, and we don’t allow refunds on those once you leave the counter. But these people have already decided at this point they’ll just make dinner themselves, and don’t want their bread anymore. And nobody knows what happens to these breads. They get abandoned in the carts, on the shelves, on the floors. We find a dozen breads abandoned in shopping carts every day.
And it’s not like the bakery can take those back. Who knows if something’s been done to the breads or not. So we’re forced to throw these away as trash. It happens every single day. The bakery guys are on the verge of breaking down, but nobody’s been able to solve this problem.
Back in the day, when we were just a little grocery store, we were next to the hospital, right? So a lot of people would come here to buy hot water and instant noodles, to make food for patients. We’ve got about a dozen in-house thermos that are marked as ours. After two months, all the thermos were gone. And I’d see that our thermos ended up in the hospital. People would come in with those thermos to buy hot water. And I’ll be like, “This is our thermos. It’s got our address and our name printed on it.” And they’d stare at me, and then just walk away. And when I tried to stop them, they’d just throw the thermos on the ground and shatter it and run away.
Leaving me to cry there by myself.
And bread again. Packaged bread. People used to be poor. They go to the hospital, and often times just buy a bread roll as dinner. Sometimes, they don’t have much of an appetite because they’re sick, so they’d take a bite and be done. That’s their own problem, it’s nothing wrong with the food. It’s got nothing to do with us.
But you guess it. They’d bring it back, wth a bite taken out of it and everything, and want a refund. And these people are never in a good mood. They’re coming out of a hospital, aching for a fight. You can’t argue with them at all. They’d just blown a fortune at the hospital, or got told there’s no cure for them. A lot of them escalate things to the point where we’ve got no choice but to refund them. Some people literally pull out a knife to ask if we give refunds.
You never know how bad the tiniest loophole can get. What’s the problem with welding a cage onto faucets? I want people to have to show ID before getting water.
A lot of people don’t know how bad people can get when there are no laws to hold them in check.
I’m not afraid of bad people, or insane people.
But I am sacred of naive idiots who don’t believe people can be that bad and try to defend them.”
Comments say, “When we were going to uni, hot water used to be free. But people from all the nearby apartment complexes would walk over with big thermos to get water. Or even bring over big buckets for it. It was impossible for the actual students to get any. Our principle wandered into someone with a big bucket before, and asked her what she was going to use all that water for, and she told him all smug that if she doesn’t use it all up, she can just dump it out. Then we changed the system to where you have to scan your student ID to get water, and these people started robbing IDs from students to use. In the end, we had to go with a closed campus policy.”
“We just gotta wait for all the old people to die.”
“People know shame once they have a full stomach. They learn manners once they have a full pantry.”
Get well soon!