Store Owner Tricked Some High School Kids Into Working For Free, So They Emptied The Store Of Tons Of Goodies To Make Their Party Last All Summer Long

A summer job is a great way for high school and college students to make some extra money, but nobody wants to spend their summer hard at work and end up not getting paid.

In today’s story, three high school students are tricked into working for free for an entire month, so they plot a way to get revenge on the store owner and get paid for their hard work.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

Won’t pay us? Fine, we’ll pay ourselves.

I grew up in a small town in the South. Summer jobs were hard to come by, unless you wanted to drive an hour away to the city.

We had a few mechanics, some gas stations, a general store, and a church on every block. There were a lot of farms around that would hire high school kids, but summers in the South are hot and humid. The holy grail was an indoor job with air conditioning.

The summer before my senior year, I thought that my buddies and I– let’s call them Fred and Ben– had landed an awesome job at the general store.

The owner, who I will call Dface, needed three people to unload the trucks and stock shelves in the morning. We had to report for work at 5 am, but it was only three days a week, and we were done by 10, meaning we had the rest of the day to lay around and fish.

Now, there were some red flags that I, being young, did not recognize at the time. The fact that Dface wrote IOU slips at the end of every week instead of checks was a huge one. He promised to pay us in full at the end of the month.

We were kind of mad that we wouldn’t have money to spend, but it was an easy job with good hours, so we kept working, looking forward to that sweet paycheck at the end of the month. With it being an under-the-table job, there wasn’t too much I could do.

Dface didn’t really pay them.

The time comes. Dface tells us at the end of our shift that our paychecks are clipped to our time cards.

Ecstatic to finally be paid, we go in, open the envelopes… and see that we have each been given a $50 gift certificate to the store.

The strange and growing mixture of confusion and horror is a set of feelings that I will always remember.

Fred, Ben, and I approach Dface behind the cash register and tentatively ask when we are really going to get paid.

He looked at us like we were the dumbest people he had ever seen. “That is your pay,” he said.

OP and his friends were furious!

We called BS and demanded real checks.

“Well, I can’t do that. All I can give you is the gift certificate.”

What happened next was what you’d expect from a couple of mad high school rednecks. Obscenities were shouted. Some things were thrown. Fred kicked over a candy display.

We stormed out of there swearing and I was just seeing absolute red. That idiot had used us for slave labor. Took advantage of some high school kids to get free work for a month!

They knew they would need to get revenge themselves.

It went without saying that we were thirsty for vengeance.

Now, this was a long time ago. Like pre-internet, pre-Desert Storm long ago. And we lived in a very rural area.

So we couldn’t just call some bureau of labor, or go viral on social media, or whatever people think of as “revenge” these days. We couldn’t even really tell our parents, cuz they would have said it was a learning experience or some such thing.

There was really no concept of worker’s rights or anything like that. In this particular state, there still isn’t to this day. We had to handle this ourselves.

They plotted revenge.

From then on, we had nightly meetings on a piece of property owned by Fred’s dad. There was only one purpose, one subject of discussion: revenge.

We went through all the usual options– arson, vandalism, and so on. But in the end we decided that straight out theft would be the most reasonable option.

We were jipped for a month’s work, and for the scales of justice to balance, we needed payment.

As I said, this was a long time ago. Dface had some cameras, but they were poor quality, and there were only a few. One out front, one by the register, and one over the beer coolers. There were no cameras in the loading dock or the back room, where the beer overstock was stored. We knew this because we had seen the little monitor display in Dface’s office.

There was also an old doorway that was boarded over and sealed with polyurethane in the back of the building, but was otherwise unsecured. In other words, our work was cut out for us.

It was the night of the revenge.

We parked in the woods behind the store and watched it for a few nights to see if Dface had taken any additional security precautions in light of his deception. He hadn’t. The closing cashier just locked the front door at 9 pm and left.

We met up the next night at about 2 am. The town was dead asleep.

We piled into Fred’s oversized pickup truck, drove to the store, killed the headlights, and pulled up to the loading dock.

My heart had been thudding in my chest the whole drive over, but now a sort of steel calm had come over me. I was hyper-alert, yet calm as the eye of a storm. Our time had come.

Their plot was successful.

The wooden door went down with ease when Ben put his shoulder to it. We slipped into the backroom, stationed ourselves in a sort of assembly line by the beer racks, and we unloaded the place.

Cases of beer and jugs of wine practically flew out the back into Fred’s truck with ruthless efficiency.

In the space of maybe less than twenty minutes we had the back room cleaned out. We cleaned out that place so fast I don’t think he would have had time to s*** his pants if he somehow caught us, we would have been done and gone.

We pulled the defunct door back into place, threw a tarp over our loot, and drove to the same property where we had held our vengeance meetings.

They hid everything they stole, but they were worried the next day.

There was a disused tool shed towards the back, behind some pretty thick bush, and that’s where we had decided to put everything.

Unloading and carrying all the stuff took considerably longer than snatching it, even with a wheelbarrow, and the sky was starting to shade pink by the time we had it all squared away. Nevertheless, we were all able to make it to Fred’s house before his parents woke up and got suspicious.

The next few days were tense. I saw two sheriff’s deputies parked in front of the store the following day and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.

We had to come up with a cover story and rehearsed it multiple times in case we were questioned, and I expected cops to come knocking on my door any second… But they never did. I never even saw a report on the local news.

OP and his friends made their money back and then some.

In hindsight, Dface probably knew it was us, but didn’t want it to get out that he had used slave labor in his store. I bet the only reason he called the cops in the first place was so he could file a report and write it off on his taxes.

In any case, we had hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars’ worth of beer sitting in an old tool shed, and as young Southern boys it would be a bleedin’ sin to let it go to waste.

We started “celebrating,” cautiously at first. But it didn’t take long for word to get out that there were a couple of guys who could get their hands on beer, and by the end of the summer, we were hosting bonfires on the property that were absolutely packed with high school kids. We even had some offering to buy the beer from us, and by the beginning of September we had made back any money that we lost out on thanks to Dface’s slavery shenanigans.

Another guy bought the store.

These gatherings included a fair amount of chicks, and I think it’s safe to say I lost my virginity thanks to the stolen beer in the shed. It was the best summer of my life.

As for Dface, I never saw or heard from him again. He sold the store a year later to a guy who seemed much nicer. I got another job working there the following summer for actual paychecks.

The beer didn’t even run out till the start of senior year. The last I saw of it was chugged by Fred at the end of a football game.

It sounds like things worked out better for OP then if he had gotten paid, but it was horrible of the store owner to trick high school kids into working for free.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted…

This reader thinks this story would be a good movie.

Another reader hopes they used their gift certificates.

This reader has a question about beer.

Another person doesn’t think the story really happened.

This story would make a pretty great coming of age movie!

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.