When you own a store of your own, you will often make good friends with some of your loyal customers.

What would you do if one of your customers, who you considered a friend, tried to steal from you?

That is what the shop owner in this story experienced, and he managed not just to ban the guy from the store but take his hobby too.

Check it out.

Friend tried to steal from my hobby shop, I took his hobby

I used to own a hobby shop that dealt in games and comics.

One of my regular customers was a middle-aged family guy named John.

There’s a particular collectible card game that was pretty much his only hobby.

Sounds like fun.

I was the only place in town running events for it, and the community grew really fast for the game.

It was some of my funnest years with the shop.

John was at every event.

What a jerk!

One day, he came in to buy things, and tried to pass off a fake gift certificate with a LARGE number on it.

I was stunned that he would try this.

He has one of his little daughters with him, even.

He made the copy at home (this was at a time I wasn’t using the striped, swipeable gift cards) and I immediately knew it was fake.

That was nice not to embarrass him in front of his daughter. Nicer than he deserved.

I quietly told him I knew it wasn’t real, and that he needed to leave.

Then, after stewing on it for a few days, I reached out and told him he wasn’t welcome back.

He apologized and I never saw or heard from him again.

I didn’t tell our mutual friends, but he told them what he did.

The community for the game grew so big that I had to expand to another tournament day.

Between work and family time, John only had one day of the week he could game, and I knew a few of the players were going to his house to play.

Well deserved.

So I announced the new tournament day, which was his only free day, and everyone started coming to the shop instead of his house every week.

Years later, I heard he got tired of buying new product and rarely being able to play so he tried to offload his collection but the game was dying at that point and a lot of the cards basically worthless.

Hey, he did it to himself. How did he think he was going to get away with it?

Take a look at what the people in the comments had to say.

This person thinks he should have lost all his friends too.

Yeah, not a good friend and not very smart.

This person has a similar story.

Yeah, what was he thinking?

Just a lowlife person.

How could anyone try to pull this on a friend?

I guess they weren’t really friends, then.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.