I was nearing the end of my shift at [fast food sandwich store], when this group of 3 people comes in and hangs out around the cash register, not ordering anything when I ask them. They’re acting a little suspicious, so as I watched them as I was wiping down the counters, and I catch one of them steal maybe $2 or $3 from the tip jar and start giggling about it. I’m not very confrontational, and would probably pay $3 just to avoid having to accuse them of stealing (they seemed like the type that would flip out at me for that), so I decided to just let it go instead. In the future, I’d probably ask anyone I caught stealing to just leave, however. Anyway, after loitering for a few more minutes, they decided that they were finally going to order, and I made them a normal sandwich, at least until they asked for banana peppers. At the store I work at, all of our vegetables come already prepared and in a bag, and for some reason, the banana peppers always have a fair number of slices that are nothing but the stem and a speck of fruit around that. Normally when I grab a slice that’s 90% stem, I throw it away, but this time I decided to load them up with stem pieces. Maybe 6 or 7 stems for the 10 slices of banana peppers in total. They must not have noticed, because the stem pieces look a bit different, and are really nasty when you bite into one because they’re all hard.

Right after that, their card kept declining, and rather than paying with cash instead, they got all annoyed at me, claiming that the card swiper must not be working (it was, and had been the whole day). They didn’t pay with cash for about 5 minutes, all the while they were blaming me for their card declining, which eliminated any remaining trace of me feeling bad about it. This was probably the pettiest thing I’ve ever done.