January 26, 2025 at 4:21 pm

Annoying Customer Wanted Employee To Count All The Crickets To Make Sure She Wasn’t Getting Scammed, So They Counted Them All One By One And Removed The Bonus Crickets

by Sarrah Murtaza

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance/pexels/ Noemí Jiménez

Scam scare is always there when we’re shopping or buying things at stores, but sometimes people really need to start trusting the employees!

This woman shares how a customer wouldn’t believe her and ended up losing out on a good deal as a result.

Check out the full story!

Customer asked me to count out a bag of live crickets in front of her, loses out on bonus crickets.

I (32F) work part time at a pet store to supplement my income as my salary of a full-time teacher doesn’t always pay the bills- plus I have a few pets and 20% off of instore purchases is rather helpful.

Anyway, one of the things we supply are live and frozen feeder animals for things like reptiles, certain aquatic creatures, and invertebrates.

These include things like mice, rats, dubia roaches, blood worms, mealworms, waxworms, super worms, and crickets.

The mice and rats are either frozen or live, but either way they’re easy to count and box up for the customer. Dubia roaches, mealworms, waxworms, and super worms are prepackaged and price-marked, but the crickets are not.

They have a particular protocol of packing the crickets…

Crickets are kept in these large containers with mesh top, egg-cartons for the crickets to climb and hide in, cricket food, and hydration.

This means when customers ask for crickets, which we usually sell by the dozen, we have to count and retrieve them manually while putting them in a plastic bag we then fill with air and tie off to go with the customer.

Our method for transferring the crickets is to lightly tap the egg cartons over a funnel like object that doesn’t have a hole at the bottom.

Things get more complicated…

We tap the crickets in, wrap the plastic bag around the mouth the funnel, then tip it and lightly tap the crickets into the bag.

Some crickets jump in out of order or cling to others, so often customers are given bonus crickets, which we’re okay with, it’s better than shorting them. So, customers are always given the right amount or often more than what they asked for without an increase in price.

Most people get this… The customer in this story did not.

This is where it gets bad…

A woman comes in and she asked for four-dozen crickets; 48 crickets total.

I went to the back, tapped the crickets from the cartons into the funnel and then counted them into the bag. As per usual, the occasional extra cricket tumbled or hopped in- probably putting the total to a bit over 50 by the time I was done.

I bagged them, tied the bag, then took them to the counter.

Now, I don’t know if this woman was having a bad day or she had been stiffed by another store in the past, but she demanded that we count out the crickets in front of her before she pay for them.

This is an unusual request.

I explained that it was likely that she got more than what she asked for and counting out 48 crickets individually would take a little while.

She insisted, she wanted to be sure we weren’t “ripping her off”.

So, I got one of those small, plastic critter-keepers and a pair of tongs. I opened the bag, making it deflate and slightly more painful to work with, and inserted the tongs.

Delicately so not to crush the crickets, I grabbed each one with the tongs and started counting slowly so not to crush the crickets with the tongs or lose my place while counting (something I do struggle with), and dropped each individually counted cricket into the critter-keeper.

The woman clearly did not see that coming!

So after about five to ten minutes at the counter meticulously counting crickets with tongs, and maybe deliberately taking a little bit longer than I had to out of spite, a line was building up behind the woman and I was getting close to the end of my count.

Eventually I hit the grand total of what she paid for; 48 crickets!

And wouldn’t you believe it?

There were 10 left over in the bag; almost a whole extra free dozen she would have gotten had she not asked me to count.

It only gets better…

I said “Oh! Would you look at that, my mistake! You were right, I did miscount! I’ll put these other ones back and ring you up for the 48, I’ll be right back!”

And before she could protest, I wandered off to dump the last 10 crickets back into the cricket container.

When I came back to check her out, she was silent, not looking at me, did her best to ignore the irritated looks of the customers lining up behind her while I poured her 48 crickets back into a plastic bag.

She learned her lesson…

She paid then slunk off sheepishly out the door without a thank you or a glance back.

I then got through the rest of the line quickly and apologized to the customers in line for the wait.

I sent them home with some free samples, thanked them for their patience, then continued along with my shift.

She never complained, and she did return to the location several times after…

She never asked anyone to count crickets again.

YIKES! That must have felt really good!

This employee knew what she was doing, and it sounds like the customer learned her lesson!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit have to say about this one.

This user thinks the difference isn’t that big and that this employee is being happy for nothing.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

This user wants to know how the others responded to the situation.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

This user shares their friend’s story…

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

This user knows that stores always give more crickets than asked for.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

This user thinks this story was simply a waste of time.

Source: Reddit/Malicious Compliance

If she had just taken the bag, it would’ve been a better deal!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.