Two restaurant thefts.

So, at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, we had two recent restaurant thefts this past month.

Like, when you walk in towards the back, we have a large table pushed against the wall, and six little table tents with numbers where we lay out the different delivery orders, the ones that need payment closer to us, and the ones for pick-up by app drivers farther out towards the end towards the front door.

And, one weekday, an app delivery driver came in, and their order was already gone, and we realized that someone had walked in during a busy time like they were an app delivery driver, and by the time we asked them for the name on the order they had already gotten up to the table and were looking at the receipts stapled onto the bags like they were an app delivery driver and they just read the name off of whichever one there that they were looking at then, and so they snuck past us and took one and walked out with it without us knowing that anything was wrong at the time.

And then, two days later, the same thing happened again.

My one (older) (Thai ) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said that that order was one that a customer had prepaid online and come in themselves to pick up, and when she had told them that someone stole their order, the customer was like, "Are they bringing it back?", and she had to be like, "No, someone stole it!".

A long time ago before I started working there we had already put the ones that need payment closer to us, so that we can keep track of them and also keep the delivery drivers away from the counter and the tip jar -- a while ago someone took money out of the tip jar, she said -- but now she decided to put the app delivery driver orders behind the counter, so we have to verbally confirm and hand them over and there's no way that someone can just come in and take one.

She said that we had this happen twice before but it was years ago and those times were a long time apart from one another, but to have two happen in three days shows that word had gotten out and people were targeting us, and so we have to be more careful to prevent it.