Delivery story 263 Chinese Food Scam writes: I work for a Chinese food delivery place. It's not pizza, but it's the same thing. We're located in a major city in Texas right next to the airport and because of this most of our customers are from hotels. As part of our policy, we give free small plates of food to the front desks of hotels when we deliver to one of their guests as a thank you for telling their guests about our store. This usually results in a lot of help from the front desk staff in finding missing customers or finding customers when we have the wrong room number. They enjoy the food. We enjoy the business. Some people, however, try to take advantage of it and one particular day I caught them in the act. There was a Motel 6 on the bad side of town that we would deliver to. It would happen every once in a while that we would get an order, go to the hotel, give the front desk her free plate, and then no one would be in the room for the delivery. We would ask the front desk lady to check the name in her computer in case we got the wrong room. She would tell us she couldn't find a guest by that name. Oddly, the front desk lady's voice sounded similar to the person that ordered. This happened about three times until on the fourth time I realized it was happening and caught her in her lie. She was faking these orders to get free plates, which we couldn't understand why, because if she wanted to order herself we would give her a special rate. One day she tried to pull the scam on us again. I recognized her voice and took the order. Then I called the hotel back and asked for the room number of the delivery. They picked up and told us they didn't order anything. In fact, they had already ordered pizza. So I had caught her. Here's where it gets stupid. I called her and told her that this was the fourth time that I know of that she's done this--try to get free food from us by faking a guest order. She started screaming and cursing at me saying I was a liar, blah blah, and asked why she would want free food. I spoke in a very calm tone, "I can't deliver to your hotel anymore. Please take our menu off your list." She screamed some more about me being a liar and then hung up. Then about five minutes later, she called back, apologized, and said she'll pay for the order and to send it out. I said, "Great! Thanks for your honesty." I delivered it myself. After all the trouble and all the money she lost me, I delivered her food. I arrived and all of a sudden she said she didn't have enough money. Her order was 12.95. She gave me 12 dollars. She was totally rude about it, too, telling me how the guy who took her order was an a$$#@!e. (I guess she didn't realize it was me.) I took the food back from off her desk, gave her back her money, took our stack of menus off her desk, and walked away. As I walked out the door she cursed at me some more. Never in my entire two years as a shift manager, have I dealt with such a bad person. return to top