We’ve seen it four times now: different players every time, but the script is the same:
1) A large group of people (usually three or four adults and some children) comes into a Chinese restaurant for the all-you-can-eat buffet.
2) Everyone in the group makes several trips to the buffet, bringing back heaping plates of food each time.
3) At the end of the meal, someone at the table — barely visible over the stacked plates and empty crab leg shells — summons a waitress.
4) The waitress is told to summon a manager.
5) The manager, upon arrival, is told, “We want our money back. The food on this buffet is terrible. We can’t hardly eat it. It’s cold and doesn’t taste fresh. We’re not going to pay for food like this.”
This speech is made with a straight face, even though the table is littered with dirty dishes. (Once, even as the adult leader of the group delivered the speech, the kids were still scarfing down mounds of chicken fried rice.) As the confrontation develops, the group leader will finally raise his voice, assume a threatening posture, and/or pretend a complete inability to understand the buffet manager’s broken English.
The group departs without paying or tipping, leaving the buffet staff to clear the table and argue with each other in rapid Chinese.
Each time we’ve seen this little drama play out, the details are so consistent, we can almost spot “Buffet Scammers” just by the size of their party and the amount of food they pile on their plates.
So how about it? Have you seen the buffet scam in action? And is the buffet scam a strategy — something people learn and pass along — or is the fact we’ve seen it more than once lately strictly a coincidence?
Never have I witnessed this scenario, though I don’t doubt that it happens often enough. One time we were at an ‘Old Country Buffet’ and sitting in the booth behind me was a couple who were getting along in their golden years. The woman started fussing about something and when a bus-person walked by started raging to them about “this gawd awful hair in my food” and “I want my money back”. The bus person said they would go get the manager. I could hardly contain myself from wanting to turn around and watch because this lady was so dramatic and I hardly heard two words from her husband. But when the manager came over, she was overly defensive about this “alleged hair”. “Well ANYBODY who is in the kitchen or works the buffet tables wears a hairnet or a hat, you can’t possibly know that a hair came from one of our workers” “I can’t refund your money…you used your Golden Buckeye card (senior citizen discount) for a buy one get one free dinner, and I see that your husband seems to be enjoying HIS meal”
Now I was enraged by the way this manager was treating the woman, who shortly thereafter got her husband to finish his dinner so they could leave.
Before we left, I went over to where the manager woman was standing with another management looking fellow (he was the manager, she was the assistant) and stated that I thought that the customer behind me had been treated rudely and that I had witnessed 5 people, including the both of them, go in and out of the kitchen with no hat or hairnet…and two of those people were actually servicing the buffet. The manager didn’t acknowledge the hairnet thing, but defended his assistant by saying they get a lot of people try to scam them for a free meal. They both looked like they didn’t give a care about customer satisfaction, so I just left. I don’t like going to big ‘chain’ style buffets anyway – so not ever going back there again was not a sacrifice for me.