Thief Gets What He Thinks Is A $75 Gift Card, Is Painfully Mistaken

For some, fellow co-workers are the reason they stay at the workplace. But unfortunately, not everyone is lucky enough to have such amazing colleagues.

This redditor, for instance, had to work with an employee who would steal his tips. The OP overheard him laughing about it to others at work and decided to take petty revenge, which he successfully executed as the co-worker was leaving the company.

Working in a bar—like most things in life—comes with a set of advantages and disadvantages. While it usually enables one to meet all sorts of people and ensures no two days are the same, it also entails working in a fast-paced, typically noisy environment, which can get tiresome at best.

In both cases, colleagues play a crucial role. On one hand, few things are more fun working behind a bar than having good chemistry with your fellow bartender—joking around, helping each other out, and knowing what the other person might need before they’re even able to ask for it. On the other hand, an aggravating or troublesome co-worker can make an already draining job needlessly more difficult.

According to Zippia, there are roughly 570,000 bartenders currently employed in the US, with the majority of them—somewhere around 60%—being women. It’s unclear how many of them make great or terrible colleagues, but it seems that the OP’s colleague isn’t the only one sticking his fingers into someone else’s honey pot. While it might not be out of a co-worker’s pocket, theft—together with free drinks and over-pouring—is believed to result in bars losing roughly 20% of their inventory.

According to Restaurant Online, theft at bars is a common problem. A New York-based veteran bartender, Freddy Thomas, told the site that he hasn’t come across a single establishment where he hasn’t noted at least one instance of theft. “Nothing can stop a determined and clever thief,” Thomas pointed out, adding that experienced bartenders eventually figure out how to work around all sorts of systems at work.

But it’s not only bars that suffer losses because of their employees. Data presented by Business.org suggests that more than one-in-five small businesses have had employees steal from them, with money, food, clothing, time, and office supplies being the main targets.

In the OP’s case, it wasn’t the bar itself that his colleague was stealing from, but a fellow bartender—and the latter wasn’t going to let it slide. Coming up with a plan for petty revenge, he not only got back at the tip thief, but made quite a few redditors laugh as well, as they shared in the comments under the OP’s post.