It's a common policy for restaurants and food vendors to give a refund if something is found in the customer's food, such as a bug or a harmful substance. Particularly dishonest people might try to take advantage of this policy and, hoping not to get caught, plant something into their food right after purchase so they can get their meal for free. Expect them to make a scene and play up wanting their way to ensure they get their money back for what isn't even the vendor's fault. Alternatively, they aren't interested in getting their money back, but just want to tarnish the vendor's reputation.
If this practice appears in fiction, it will probably be portrayed in very negative light and performed by a Jerkass, or at the very least someone who needs to learn their lesson.
Contrast Revenge Is a Dish Best Served and Tampering with Food and Drink, where the substance being placed in the food is not an accident, assuming it is found before consumption. May involve Fly in the Soup.
It is highly unadvised to attempt this as being caught can lead to serious criminal and civil penalties, if only being banned for life from the restaurant.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Crayon Shin-chan has an instance that results in some sweet, delicious Laser-Guided Karma. A pair of hooligans enters Susan Koyuki's diner where Shin-Chan, Hiroshi and Yonroh happens to be having lunch, and after ordering food the punks tries extorting Koyuki by claiming there's a cockroach in their spaghetti. Koyuki instead whips out a magnifying glass, inspects the roach, and claims "it's not from her shop" before punching her shop's paneling wall, resulting in a dozen huge roaches scurrying out note . Then Shin-Chan noticed and pickpockets a tiny plastic pouch containing several small roaches from one of the hooligans' back-pockets, and realizing they've been exposed, the hooligans attempts a violent retaliation... only for Koyuki to eject them via storefront. Complete with some stern warnings to never show their faces again ("Step foot in my diner once more, and next time I'll throw you a few more blocks over!").
- Mobile Fighter G Gundam: Sai Sachi meets Cécile when she stands up to three men beating up an old vendor for a bug in their food that they themselves put in.
- During the Baratie Arc in One Piece, Lieutenant Fullbody wants to get back at Sanji for humiliating him so he puts an insect in his soup to tarnish the reputation of his restaurant.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion has Sakunami Karera, whose Stand ability, Love Love Deluxe, can be used to make hair grow out of surfaces. Her Establishing Character Moment has her use this ability to make a hair appear in a yakitori skewer, so she can extort money from the chef who made it.
- Your Name: Near the end of Mitsuha's first day in Taki's body, a customer at the restaurant Taki works at reports finding a toothpick in his pizza. Mitsuha points out the restaurant doesn't have toothpicks, so the man tries to make a scene and Miki decides it's better to follow the manual and make his pizza free of charge. After the restaurant closes for the day, the staff lament that it was clear he was scamming them, and it further turns out that he slashed Miki's skirt with a box cutter on his way out.
Comic Books
- The Simpsons: In one of the comics we learn that Bart regularly puts tentacles in his ice cream so that he doesn't have to pay for it.
Film — Live-Action
- Dance of the Drunk Mantis: A pair of unnamed beggars eating at a noodle kiosk tries scamming a free meal by dropping a dozen dewinged houseflies from a matchbox one of them is carrying and demanding for a refund.
- Heartbreakers: Early on, mother-and-daughter con-artist team Max and Paige Conners eat dinner in a restaurant. Max discreetly crushes an ashtray under her heel and sprinkles the glass on her salad, then reacts in fake shock. They get their meals for free.
- Pirates: Having been saved from maritime distress by a Spanish galleon and fearful of being identified as the notorious pirate captain that he is, Bartholomew Red attempts to incite a mutiny among the common sailors after one of them finds a dead rat in the soup pot from which they are being fed, claiming the rat as proof that they are being intolerably mistreated. However, the fact that Red killed a rat in the preceding scene strongly suggests that he himself is responsible for the rat being there in the first place. The plan does not work as intended, leading to a gross scene in which the Spanish captain forces Red to eat the cooked rat himself.
- Strange Brew: Half-wit Canadian brothers Bob and Doug McKenzie try to obtain free beer by taking a bottle with a mouse in it. A live mouse they raised inside a beer bottle. Their efforts to scam the brewery kick off the plot.
- Striptease: In one scene, Shad the Bouncer is seen carefully tampering with a yogurt container so he can slip in a cockroach, which he will then use to file a Frivolous Lawsuit on the yogurt's manufacturer. It ends up going wrong for Shad, though, because in a latter scene where he meets a lawyer to file it, the lawyer's secretary eats the yogurt, dead cockroach and all while they weren't looking.
- Double Subverted in Victor/Victoria. Victoria, who hasn't gotten a decent meal in a week, attempts this out of desperation after finding an enormous cockroach in her flophouse room. The waiter is wise to the con and starts implying that he's going to have her arrested unless she fesses up... until the cockroach turns up at another table nearby, inadvertently setting off a Bar Brawl and letting her and Toddy abscond with full stomachs amid the confusion.
Literature
- In The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, he recounts how his friend Doug Willoughby did this in a local restaurant. First, he put a dead June bug in his soup, which got the two of them free hot fudge sundaes. The following week, he topped up his water glass with pond water full of tadpoles, which got them another two free sundaes. The following week, he dumped two pounds of dead insects in his soup... which got him banned from the restaurant. (Bill, suspecting it wouldn't work a third time, had wisely chosen not to sit with him.)
- Our Home's Fox Deity: A father and son pair of Kitsune is turned out into human habitat after their home in the mountains has been destroyed. The father tries to eat a meal without paying by putting hairs in his dish; too bad the chef is revealed to be bald.
Live-Action TV
- In Arrested Development, Maeby's Establishing Character Moment has her taking a fox foot (that she cut off of Lucille's fox pelt) and planting it in a frozen banana so she can scam a refund from George Michael.
- Breakout Kings: In the pilot episode, the team goes to a restaurant and con artist Philly puts a hair in her dish so she doesn't have to pay for it. Even though the waitress seems suspicious, it still works.
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Jake's half-sister Kate makes a habit of this. He finds this out when she offers to treat him for dinner, then pulls out a Ziploc full of glass shards, plants a couple in her food, and begins loudly complaining and making a scene. He and Amy are utterly mortified.
- An episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation had Spinner put a roach in the food at the school's cafeteria. After Ashley inadvertently exposed him, he was forced to work there serving the food.
- In an episode of El Chavo del ocho, La Chilindrina witnesses Doña Florinda comping the meal of a patron that found a fly in his coffee, and convinces Chavo to capture a fly on a salt shaker to put in their coffee to get their own meals comped. Too bad they failed to actually kill it and it just flies away when trying to put it in the coffee, Disaster Dominoes ensue as Chavo tries to recapture the fly in the middle of the restaurant.
- The Golden Girls: In one episode, after Dorothy takes them out to a restaurant and orders a bottle of champagne they can't afford, Sophia pours salt into her glass, complains that it's swill, and they get the meal for free.
- Hannah Montana: In "You Give Lunch A Bad Name", Mamaw becomes the new school lunch lady and humiliates Miley and Jackson. In an effort to get her to leave, they disguise Jackson as a health inspector and plant hair into her food to make it look like she's contaminated it. However, his disguise falls off, and Mamaw is hurt to learn her grandkids did that to her.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "Charlie Work," part of the Gang's scam involves buying a huge amount of steaks and contaminating them with chicken feathers so they can get a refund.
- Just Shoot Me!: Finch has a friend who does this for a living. When Maya goes out on a date with him, she tells Finch that he pulled this on her date, even though she is oblivious and thinks it was the restaurant's fault.
- Law & Order: Criminal Intent: Double subverted in "Death Roe". A food critic is murdered before she can give her meal a bad review, but it soon comes out that the food wasn't just bad, but poisoned (though it wasn't the food that killed her, as she was beaten and stabbed) and that the owner of the restaurant wasn't the one who poisoned the food. Turns out, it was his jealous and perverse father-in-law who did it to sink his fledging restaurant and to keep the daughter he had been molesting to himself, even killing the man after setting him up for the fall.
- Leverage: Sophie pulls this at a Persian restaurant, but it's not actually part of the con, it's just a distraction so that Elliot and Hardison could sneak a look at their files (the restaurant is a front for Iranian spies).
- Oh, Doctor Beeching! had an episode with an inspection due on the station, with a view towards closing it. Two characters sabotage some of the food in the refreshment room, without each others knowledge. When the inspection is cancelled, they decide not to let the pie and tea go to waste. The character who sabotaged the tea eats the pie with a worm in it, while the one who sabotaged the pie drinks the tea with cleaning product in it. Right in front of each other, without saying anything.
- In "I Believe in Aliens" from Resident Alien, when a Grey alien stops time in Joe's Diner to speak with Hugh Mann Harry Vanderspeigle, Harry takes advantage of the situation by plucking a fly from the air and placing it in his food, then refusing to pay for it after the time stop ends.
- In the Brit Com Shelley, one of Shelley's mates is a minor Con Man who pretty much lives by scamming free product from big corporations. One of the scams he describes involved writing to a cereal company claiming to have found a cockroach in his cereal. As a convincer, he enclosed half a cockroach in the envelope. The company sent him a six month supply of cereal.
Video Games
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: In a Sidequest to convince a Caustic Critic to pan a specific restaurant, a Malkavian player character can use their clan's unique Dementation power to make the critic hallucinate maggots in the food.
Web Original
- Not Always Legal: In this story
, a group of businessmen holding a lunch meeting at a restaurant claim to have found a hair in the food and demand the chef come out and apologize to them personally. The lunch shift at that restaurant is very slow, so there's only two people working in the kitchen at all. Both come out, and instead of apologizing remove their chef hats. The hair in question was short and black; one chef is completely bald, the other has thigh-length hair ... but all the businessmen had short black hair matching the one they "found". The businessmen are then banned from the restaurant.
Western Animation
- In the episode "Stan's Food Restaurant" of American Dad!, Roger poses as a customer of Stan's restaurant and tries to ruin its reputation by pretending that there is a cockroach in his salad. He fails both because Stan remembers his restaurant doesn't serve salad and the dishes they do serve are all on edible pancake plates, which Roger's is not.
- Big City Greens:
- In the episode "Desserted", Cricket tires to get out of competing in a Mega Meal Challenge by putting a fly in the giant sundae he's supposed to eat. Unfortunately for him, that just means they have to give him a new sundae and restart the challenge.
- At the end of "Photo Op", Bill takes Tilly, Cricket, and Gramma to the food court to make up for lying to them about taking there earlier when he wanted them to go with him to get a family photo taken. Tilly tells the manager that she found a hair in her milkshake to get a refund so she can use the money to take the family photo Bill wanted in a photo booth.
- Bob's Burgers: In "A Few 'Gurt Men", a customer pulls this scam on both Bob and Jimmy Pesto, pretending to find a hair in the last bite of his food to get a free meal. They try to get back at the scammer, a celebrity impersonator, by hiring him to perform at a party and then refusing to pay him...only to discover they'd already paid online in order to book the performance.
- Chowder: In "The Rat Sandwich," Reuben hides his pet rat in a sandwich he gets from Mung Daal so he can get the sandwich for free, and blackmails Mung and his employees to give Reuben anything he wants. By the end of the episode, the rat and his comrades rebel against Reuben due to never getting his share of the food. At the end of the episode, the rat plays the same trick as Reuben, claiming there's a "dead" roach in his food.
- Family Guy: In "Fore, Father" Peter tries to teach Chris how to get out of paying a restaurant check by putting a dead body in his soup. Things go sideways when Chris' body turns out to still be alive.
- Johnny Test: In "Bugged Out Johnny", Johnny finds out that he can get a refund for purchased food if a bug is found in it, so he keeps putting bugs into the food he buys so that he can use the money for other purposes. Eventually, Johnny runs out of bugs and tries to use a ladybug from Susan and Mary's lab, but it turns out to have an enormous appetite due to experimentation and needs to be stopped before it eats all the town's plants.
- Discussed in South Park's "A Ladder to Heaven" when Cartman mocks Kyle by claiming the Jewish idea of heaven is "getting five dollars off your matzo ball soup at Barney's Beanery by lying about a hair in it."
Real Life
- In 2005, a woman in San Jose, California claimed to have found a human finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili, and sued the company. The finger turned out to have been planted by her and an associate, and the woman was sentenced to prison for fraud.
- When he revisited the notorious Amy's Baking Company to find out if anything at all had sunk in from his visit, Gordon Ramsay learnt that people had been visiting the place purely and simply to place ever-more-obviously planted things in the food. Not to chase refunds, but simply to get a rise out of the unstable Amy and her abominable consort Sammy, hoping to provoke a psychotic explosion out of them on a par with those seen in the TV show.
- In 2017, a woman "found" a hair in her meal and informed the owners, who refused to refund her. The disgruntled customer posted a negative review on Tripadvisor, to which the restaurant owners responded by publicly releasing the CCTV footage of her placing one of her own hairs into the food. They were also able to get Tripadvisor to remove the negative review.
- Cleveland abductor and rapist Ariel Castro's backstory had him pretending to find dog hair in his fast food burgers to procure free food for himself and his children and then feeding the "bad" food to his dogs. In a roundabout way years later during his month-long imprisonment before he committed suicide, he would go on to claim that his own food was contaminated with everything from plastic to hair.
