It’s 12:15 on a Tuesday afternoon and a line of high schoolers pour out of Obento. Inside, chatter and energy fills the room as the students anxiously wait for their katsu. The staff rush to keep up with the orders, but in the chaos, some students take advantage of the incessant distractions.
Every day during lunch, students may be found plundering the Obento cold case. It’s not hard to see why. With so many people cycling through, it’s easy to feel invisible and anonymous. “There is like, 100 kids in there, nobody is watching,” one anonymous sophomore said.
The line from Obento stretches at least 10 minutes. For many, stealing feels more like skipping the line rather than theft. Beyond the long wait and anonymity, the common consensus is that Obento is expensive. Some students point to the high prices as their justification, “I am not paying $4 for a Ramune, or $10 for 6 pieces of fake crab sushi,”the same sophomore said.
Not every student who has stolen from Obento feels good about it. “I do it pretty often and I kinda feel bad about it,” the anonymous student continued. “But you are so hungry and the line is genuinely so insane.” Among the Obento bandits, this inner conflict seems pretty common. Students are not oblivious to the fact that Obento is a small business and their theft has an impact; it’s just easier.
Stealing from Obento could have a larger impact than some students realize. Most restaurants, including Obento, operate on a paper thin profit margin that rarely is bigger than 5%. 100 dollars in stolen sushi could erase all of the profit for the day’s lunch rush.
Some students agree. “It is a local place, which are fading out now,” one sympathetic senior said. “Stealing from Obento is very different from stealing from some place like Walmart.”
But how can Obento fix this problem? The physical layout presents a problem, the cold case cannot fit behind the counter, it remains in the customer area where staff cannot supervise it. This placement combined with high traffic lunch rushes creates an environment, where to the Obento bandits, stealing is more like skipping the line. But in reality, it’s theft from a local business, which are becoming ever more vulnerable in Humboldt.
