Enjoying Your Orange Juice Cheapskate?

[TruthHurts]

I am cleaning rooms and I see a woman pull up, she gets out of her car and starts to fill up a Big Gulp cup with ice. This is normal non-guests stopping by to grab a little ice , no problem as long as it's a small amount. I then see her go into the breakfast room and come out ten seconds later drinking something from the cup.

My boss asks me what room the lady went into, I tell her that the lady never went into a room, she just hopped in her van and left. That's when I realized it, this woman who was chattering on her cellphone, driving a very nice van, and wearing some swanky looking clothes snuck into our breakfast room to swipe some orange juice. Because apparantly going to a store and spending your own money in out of the question. The breakfast supplies are for the paying guests of our hotel, not some silly bimbo too cheap to buy her own beverages.

Really how cheap can a person be????

[Antisocial_Worker]

Plenty cheap. I HATE it when the continental breakfast turns into a continental lunch, and then a continental supper. From the way some people come up to the front to get some juice, you could only conclude that drinking orange juice is a major way to have fun, and the trend hasn't spread here quite yet. Maybe in the bigger cities soon there will be orange juice drinking leagues with outfits and cheerleaders.

I don't know if it's because the kids are antsy, or if it's because their parents keep tossing them out of the room, or what, but I've counted one family's kids come up to the front no fewer than 24 times in a single shift. They get juice, cornflakes from the dispenser, or something from the snack machine every single time.

[Mixed Bag]

Not to antagonize anyone, but shouldn't lodging throw in the towel on asking guests not to take ice for their ice chests (or have I not noticed a new lack of such signs)? Sorry if this is a problem, but I can hardly imagine anyone I know not feeling silly for taking the trouble to buy it elsewhere instead.

[Tito]

Wow, that's cheap.

I've stayed at hotels before where you have to be a guest to get it, because you need your room card to buzz yourself in. I'm beginning to see why hotels are doing that.

[Imogene]

Vaguely related, yes, people are cheap. You have no idea how often I've bought a tube of lipstick, only to get it home and realize someone just pulled the cap up without tearing the seal off, so it's been used, in store... I usually just throw those away. There's no way I could ever even attempt to return a used lipstick. How would they know it wasn't I who had used it like that?

[PuckishOne]

Also vaguely related...

When I worked in HR, the company discontinued the yearly employees' picnic because so many people took the food (and not just the packaged stuff like chips, but the cooked food as well) away. They would wrap it up in napkins, hide it in tote bags, and even give it to their children to carry out.

At first I thought it was rather sad, until the year I saw parents sending their children back multiple times to get the "goodie bags" we used to give out (little soft toys, decals, things like that). About 2 hours into the picnic we ran out of bags, so any kids who came in after got nothing. Same thing started happening with the food, and that's when the management pulled the plug.

[AFpheonix]

Vaguely related, yes, people are cheap. You have no idea how often I've bought a tube of lipstick, only to get it home and realize someone just pulled the cap up without tearing the seal off, so it's been used, in store... I usually just throw those away. There's no way I could ever even attempt to return a used lipstick. How would they know it wasn't I who had used it like that?

Depends on which store you purchase it from. My chain and several other drug store chains will accept cosmetic returns.

[dragonflygrrl]

My fiance's company used to give every employee a frozen Butterball turkey every Thanksgiving (not terribly useful, since it was given to us still frozen rock solid on the Wednesday, but still a nice gesture, I guess). They had to stop because certain people would go to the truck and just load up their cars with frozen turkeys, leaving none for the night shift. I mean, who really wants more than maybe two turkeys in the freezer at any one time?

Back to topic (sort of), I get people coming into the store who "just want to charge up their phones." They don't want to buy anything, or get their phone fixed or serviced in any way, they just want to suck free electricity from our store. I just smile as vapidly as I can and say, "oh, the car chargers are right over here. Let me show you the one for your phone." Eventually they either conclude that I am too stupid to understand what they are actually asking for or realize that they are not going to get me to give out free power.

[NightWolf]

It's amazing the level of cheapness out there. The hotel where I worked was actually dumb enough to do a "free bar" time. From 5pm - 7pm the guests got free cocktails. We, as in security, always had to stand by the gate and ask guests for their tickets because we always had morons who weren't staying at the hotel try and swing in for free drinks. It was especially bad when the guests of the hotel would take drinks OUT of the free bar area to their just visiting friends sitting just outside the area.

[Crow The Robot]

Man, what a cheap little twerp, i cannot imagine the nerve, of a person who would steal, l(et's face it they didn't pay for anything), o.j. or at least not askpermission, they are depriving paying guests of juice and that is a shame.I wonder if she does the same thing at fast food joints? Probably does. Hope she gets caught and hauled off to the county cooker. But then, she'd probably write to rip-off report, wouldn't she.

[Crafty1289]

oh yes, people can be very cheap. one woman comes into our shop every afternoon to look at the "reduced to clear" section in our coolers, to see what ridiculously cheap things are on offer today because they go out of code tomorrow.

She never buys anything at full price, she doesn't even go near the company-wide scheduled promotion section!!! I think we ought to be able to ban such people as this. She will sometimes clear us out of everything that has been reduced that day in one swoop! You'd think we would be happy for this maybe, but its the fact she does this every day that pisses us off, and we make a loss every day by serving her. She's a horrible, horrible woman, terribly overweight, my manager hates her for doing this. He'd rather throw the out of date food in the bin than let her buy it. Its such a sucky thing to do.

Sometimes i'll just be starting to put reduced stickers on the goods i have found to reduce, when she'll walk in, and i'll stop, take my stickers in the back and watch her on camera until she's left. But she comes back later, we just make her wait

[thegiraffe]

Back to topic (sort of), I get people coming into the store who "just want to charge up their phones." They don't want to buy anything, or get their phone fixed or serviced in any way, they just want to suck free electricity from our store. I just smile as vapidly as I can and say, "oh, the car chargers are right over here. Let me show you the one for your phone." Eventually they either conclude that I am too stupid to understand what they are actually asking for or realize that they are not going to get me to give out free power.

We've only done this once, and it was during Hurricane Charley. Between no power, no landline phones/cable, etc, and the piles of crap that we moved to the interior of the house in case the front doors blew in (we had to hold them in), the car chargers got lost. I live in Orlando, and we went to Tampa 2 days after the storm to take me to school. We stopped to get me a cell phone, and my dad plugged his into the store charger because driving with no cellphones is dangerous - especially just after a storm. It's an exception, but a good one I think

[Lehk]

She will sometimes clear us out of everything that has been reduced that day in one swoop! You'd think we would be happy for this maybe, but its the fact she does this every day that pisses us off, and we make a loss every day by serving her.

shiat send her my way, i wish i could get more people to buy the stickered items i hate to throw anything out, if you lose $.10 on everything she buys, that's $wholesale-.10 that you save by not throwing it out.

you could probably also get away with only stickering half as big a discount since you know she'll come in and buy the stuff

[Rapscallion]

A local fruit and veg place had a discount bin on a Monday for all the damaged/soft produce from the weekend. He found people deliberately damaging stuff to make sure there would be plenty for them cheap first thing Monday morning.

He lost a load of non-customers when he stopped putting it out on Monday.

Raspcallion

[Tigress]

Wow. That is unbelievably cheap. A quart of OJ costs less than a cup of coffee from Starbucks!

And why am I not surprised that she's well-to-do? It seems that the people that constantly try to "cheat the system" and get something for nothing are usually incredibly rich -- and got that way because they spend so much energy pulling these stunts.