“Regular” Does Not Necessarily Mean “Loyal”

There’s a customer who is a regular at both of my restaurant’s locations. He comes across as friendly. Honestly, I don’t care if a customer is nice as long as they don’t give me trouble. I have a coworker who likes to make conversation with customers and likes to kiss up to them in order to persuade them to come back again.

This particular coworker was serving the friendly regular his food. He ordered a jumbo soup ($7.70) and a jumbo pepper shrimp ($20.35). In the process of ringing him up, he told me:

Customer: “I can only afford the soup.”

So, I charged him for the soup only. But then, he was kind of charming my coworker.

Customer: “I can get the money at home later and come back to pay.”

Meaning that he would take the shrimp without paying first but would pay later.

In my mind, I was thinking that he should just come back some other time when he could afford it so that we didn’t have to chase him down for the money. But my coworker, who is also kind of my superior, told me to give him the shrimp because she assumed he would pay because she “knows” him.

This was on Friday. On Monday, I got a call from her.

Coworker: “The guy from Friday didn’t pay. You should expect him to show up today to hand over the money. I had to pay out of my own pocket to cover the cost of the shrimp on Friday.”

He never came. It’s been a week and he still has not paid the $20.35 for the jumbo shrimp. I hope my coworker learned that it doesn’t matter what kind of “relationship” you have with a customer; you can always be in a position where they can take advantage of your kindness and use it against you.