The Pleasure

A man in Grapevine, Texas was fired from his job at a Chick-fil-A. At some point after that, he returned to the Chick-fil-A and processed eight hundred refunds for mac and cheese tray orders. The eight hundred refunds totaled eighty thousand dollars. Nobody questioned this for several months.

I am not making this up.

Chick-fil-A is a fast-food company based in College Park, Georgia. It is known for its chicken sandwiches, its closed Sundays, and its employees' practice of responding to "thank you" with "my pleasure" instead of "you're welcome." The company has invested substantially in this phrase. It signals something about how Chick-fil-A thinks about service: gracious, unhurried, unconditional.

The refund system was also, apparently, unconditional.

A mac and cheese tray at Chick-fil-A costs approximately forty dollars. Eighty thousand dollars divided by eight hundred refunds is one hundred dollars per refund. This is two and a half mac and cheese trays, which is a reasonable quantity to return if you are, for example, a catering company that over-ordered. It is a less reasonable quantity to return if you are a former employee processing the refunds yourself, repeatedly, from the same store, over a period of several months, without anyone in the approval chain pausing to ask a clarifying question.

(The mac and cheese is a side item. It is not the main product. The main product is a chicken sandwich. Whether eight hundred chicken sandwich refunds would have come to someone's attention more quickly is not known. What is known is that eight hundred mac and cheese refunds did not.)

The man has been charged with theft. The charge uses the word "allegedly," which is standard. Chick-fil-A has not said publicly what its fraud detection protocols were during the months in question. This is also standard.

The refund system performed exactly as it was built to perform. It processed each request. It approved each request. It did this eight hundred times without deviation. Whether it was built to do this eight hundred consecutive times, for the same item, from the same location, for a person who no longer worked there, is the part that appears not to have been specified.

Chick-fil-A's corporate values include a commitment to integrity. The refund system had, during this period, absolute integrity. Every transaction was completed correctly. Every record matches. The numbers add up. The system did not make a single error.

This is the whole problem.