If you order something and pay for it but it isn’t included in your delivery, you’d probably want a refund or replacement. What would you do if the company refused to do either?

In today’s story, a supervisor at a restaurant has to deal with this issue with a food delivery vendor, so he decides to teach the vendor a costly lesson that will make him change his mind.

Let’s read all the details.

You want strict compliance Mr. Food Service Driver, you get it.

After undergrad, I moved to Texas to manage with a mostly local chain of Tex-Mex restaurants.

At one of my first training stores, I was assigned a month in the kitchen to learn their BOH (back of house, i.e., the kitchen) process.

As I grew up in the business and had worked during college for a large casual dining chain, I was familiar and skilled in all of the general aspects of running this type of kitchen. However, it was a good opportunity to learn the particular aspects of this company’s operations.

Time to get to work.

After driving from north-east Dallas to Grapevine early one morning I greeted the driver, retrieved my clipboard and started supervising the unload.

He worked fast and had the truck unloaded in about 30 minutes or so.

I knew I had a good 60-90 minutes left organizing (date dotting, rotating , breaking down boxes, etc), and was happy to sign him off so he cold get on his way while I continued putting away the order.

For reference, this is how I had always done this and never had any problem.

There was a problem.

As I am working through the delivery, I notice we are short one case of 20ct shrimp.

Obviously, that’s quite a bit of money.

But those types of things happen and in my experience, the process was to call the vendor promptly and let them know.

Most times, they would contact the driver, he’d find it on the truck and bring it later or they would credit our order.

That’s not what happened this time.

But not this time.

This time, the vendor tells me that they have a strict policy about this and since I’d signed the order, they didn’t feel obligated to credit us.

I told them that seemed like a bad policy when dealing with a restaurant that was doing around $70,000 a week in sales (this is 1995) and and paid promptly.

They didn’t seem to care.

This time, he wasn’t so quick to sign the delivery form.

So next week, I again meet the driver on delivery day.

Everything was going pretty much the same, except this week, when he handed me the delivery form to sign, I informed him that since we were short last week and his company didn’t want to work with us, I wasn’t signing anything until I had *everything* counted and I couldn’t count everything, until I worked through the large pile.

Since he couldn’t leave without getting a signature, he got to stand on our back dock until I was done.

I may have been a bit extra thorough counting and organizing that day, because he was *fuming* when I got back to him about 1.5 hours later with a signed form.

This created a big problem for the vendor.

I assume that his made him late enough to miss several deliveries that day as many restaurants won’t accept delivery between 10 and 2pm.

But I know he was late to several stops because his company called me the next day and said that they couldn’t work this way.

They quickly agreed that if we cooperated and acted in good faith on future orders, they would return the favor.

We received credit for the missing shrimp on our next delivery.

Seriously, what else did they expect him to do? If they’re not going to refund him when something’s missing if he signs the form, he definitely has to look through everything before signing the form!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thinks that food delivery company’s policy was strange.

Maybe it’s a fish vendor thing?

This person shares a similar story that actually ends quite differently.

Yes, you can’t have it both ways.

This person shares a similar story that involved getting other stores involved.

They learned that time is money the hard way.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.