“2 men ordered food and drinks. Then they quietly left without paying. My coworker was in tears—the bill was a few hundred, and she counted every penny.
I ran out into the cold without a jacket and saw them. I shouted, ‘You didn’t pay!’
And then one of them turned around and smirked. ‘Must’ve slipped our minds,’ he said, laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world.
The other one, taller and quieter, kept walking. That ticked me off even more. I’m not confrontational by nature, but something about the way they walked off, like we were beneath them, just lit a fire in my chest.
I jogged after them, my sneakers slipping a bit on the frosty sidewalk. ‘Hey! You think this is a game?’ I shouted, breathing hard from the cold.
‘She’s got rent to pay. That wasn’t just some fast-food meal, you ordered steak and top-shelf liquor.’
The smug one—later I found out his name was Craig—shrugged. ‘So call the cops,’ he said.
‘What are they gonna do?’
The words caught me off guard. It wasn’t just the money. It was the casual cruelty of it.
Like it was normal to screw over people trying to get by. ‘I’ll post your faces online,’ I blurted out, pulling my phone up and snapping a blurry photo before they could stop me. Craig laughed again, mocking.
‘You think anyone cares? You work in a pub. We’re untouchable.’
I didn’t say anything else.
My hands were shaking, partly from the cold, partly from rage. They turned a corner and disappeared, and I walked back to the pub, heart pounding. My coworker, Mara, was wiping her eyes with the hem of her sleeve.
‘Did they come back?’ she asked, voice small. I shook my head. ‘No, but I got a photo.
We’ll figure something out.’
That night, I posted it on the pub’s Facebook page. Just a blurry shot and a quick line: ‘These two walked out on a £230 bill tonight. If anyone recognizes them, let us know.
Staff work too hard to get treated like this.’
I didn’t expect much. I mean, stuff like that happens all the time, right? People get away with it.
The internet moves on in ten seconds. But the post exploded. By the next afternoon, it had over 700 shares.
People from all over town started commenting, tagging friends, and sending messages. Turns out, these guys were regulars—not just at our place, but at several local bars and restaurants. And this wasn’t their first time doing it.
One girl messaged privately and said they did the same thing at her cousin’s bar two weeks earlier. A guy from a pizza place across town said they left without paying during the football finals. Another pub owner commented, “They owe us £180.
Glad someone finally called them out.”
It snowballed. Two days later, Craig’s employer saw the post. Someone tagged the company’s page, and that got shared too.
Turns out, he worked at a mid-sized law firm. By the end of the week, Craig was suspended pending review. The smugness in that smirk cracked like cheap glass under pressure.
But it was the quiet one—Ben—who surprised me. On a drizzly Thursday afternoon, he came back to the pub. Alone.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
