Greed and Dishonesty

One of our favorite places to visit, especially during the hotter weather, are the self-serve, Soft-Serve Yogurt Houses, where you get to create your own Soft-Serve Yogurt Sundae with as much or as little Yogurt and as many toppings as you'd like, within reason of course.

The way these places work is you grab yourself a tub, fill it with the yogurt (or don't, as in don't fill it) of your choice, or yogurts if you want to mix flavors. You add some toppings - or not; it's your choice - then the clerk weighs your sundae because you pay per ounce, so the more you cram into your tub, the heavier it is, and the more you pay. Quite fair, in my opinion. Just want a little? Pay a little. Want to pig out? Then you'll pay for it, now and later.

We always get the smaller of the two tubs which might hold a pint of yogurt if you filled it, but we never do. (The bigger tub is probably around 50% larger than the smaller one.). Sometimes I've filled my tub a little over halfway but for the most part we'll put a couple of coils of yogurt in the bottom then throw a few toppings on, and between the four of us we'll usually pay around $6-$8.

We frequently see other patrons also taking the smaller tub, but unlike us they'll fill it almost to the top with yogurt then hit the toppings bar and by the time they've finished you'd think there had been an earthquake. They've left so little room for toppings, but are so determined to get toppings on and, I guess, "get their moneys worth" that they'll scoop on the toppings only to have them fall off every which way (but loose. Great movie, by the way; one of my favorites). So they fill their small tub up with yogurt until it's almost overflowing, then add toppings until it is...and why are we always surprised when their single tub of yogurt rings up for as much as the four of ours?

You look at their concoction and wonder why they don't just take a big tub and half fill it instead. They'd still pay the same price for the same amount of yogurt and toppings but it wouldn't be spilling out all over the place. Except you also know that if they did take the bigger tub they'd still do exactly the same thing. So they either have no self-control - which is doubtful or they would use the bigger tub - or their greed has them convinced that by overloading their smaller tub they're "sticking it to the man"

"You're not ripping me off, Mr. Yogurt-Man! I'm filling my tub to the top. You hear me, Mr. Yogurt-Man? To. The. Top! Yeah!"

The cafeteria at my work has a salad bar. It's the kind where you get your own box and make your own salad, and like the Yogurt Houses you used to have to pay for however much you took.

But then Management made a change and suddenly a small carton of salad was just $4 while a larger carton was $6, for as much salad as you can cram into it, within reason of course. But 'reason' is overrated because just as greedy people overload their yogurt tubs, my greedy coworkers would likewise fill their salad carton so full that the cashier couldn't close the tabs on top. It was understood that the tabs needed to close or you'd pay extra but I guess some of coworkers still filled their carton To. The. Top! By which I mean over-filled it so the tabs couldn't close.

So Management replaced the cartons with clear plastic boxes. The kind with a hinge, with equal sized top & bottom (or is it bottom & top?) It doesn't matter because whichever way you flip it your box still looks the same, with the same sized bottom and the same sized top. The price is also the same but if you figure you now get less salad for the same price because the 'top' is now just halfway up the container, you'd be right.

I mentioned that to my cashier when I got my salad today, that the box is smaller now.

"No, it's the same size," she said.

I explained to her that we couldn't fill it like we could with the old cartons and that's when I learned of my greedy & dishonest coworkers who tried to "stick it to the man" and deliberately over-filled their cartons. And when those greedy, dishonest people came in and saw their cartons had been replaced by plastic containers, and they realized they couldn't get as much salad as before, that "the man was ripping them off!" do you think they still got a salad? Probably not; they probably went somewhere else.

In the short term they might have "won". They got a few extra pieces of lettuce or tomato at no additional cost, but in the long term they will never see deals like that $4 salad. Their own greed has made sure of that. They still lose, just like we all do.

He who dies with the most toys...still dies. - Random T. Shirt