Alabama Restaurant Fires Employee Who Was Caught Scooping Handfuls Of Candy From A Porch On Halloween

You can tell a lot about a person based on how they react to various tests in life that allow you to get a read on their character. That includes the route they opt to go after encountering an unattended bowl of candy on a porch on Halloween, and a grown woman in Alabama found herself out of a job after she roundly failed that assessment.

In 2017, an anthropologist named Krystal D’Costa wrote an article for Scientific American titled “Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts?” in which she set out to attempt to answer that question while examining the psychology of people who fail (or refuse) to complete that simple task.

The piece is frequently cited as the foundation for what is dubbed the “Shopping Cart Theory,” which argues that the act of returning a shopping cart (or declining to do so) is a moral litmus test that serves to reflect a person’s character by evaluating their ability to promote the greater good and prevent tears in the social fabric.

There are variations on that evaluation, including one that takes center stage whenever October 31st rolls around. Unfortunately, a restaurant employee in Alabama wasn’t able to pass the one she found herself subjected to after falling victim to a doorbell camera.

A restaurant in Alabama fired a worker who raided a bowl of Halloween candy that was left on a porch

Many people who aren’t able to physically hand out candy to trick-or-treaters on Halloween still try to get in the spirit by leaving a bowl of candy outside their front door, and even if there’s no “PLEASE TAKE ONE” sign, most people are aware you’re expected to exercise some restraint.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing stopping you from pouring every single piece into your bag or scooping up as much as you can, which is the route that two adult women in Helena, Alabama decided to go when they encountered an unattended bowl on Saturday night.

The greedier of the two was wearing a shirt for a sushi restaurant in the nearby city of Hoover, and the video generated enough backlash to force that establishment to issue a statement in which it said it was “looking into the situation.”

According to Alabama.com, the woman in the shirt was, in fact, an employee, and she informed her bosses that she returned to the home to apologize and give back the candy she pilfered.

However, things took another turn when the homeowner told the business the only apology he received was from the other woman in the video, and the restaurant subsequently terminated the worker for “being dishonest,” saying:

“Lying to us after knowing how important everything is and how important we told her this is to us and to the entire community and we basically told her that she can no longer be working with us anymore.”

Ouch.