5 Dumbest Crimes Imaginable That Happened At Chain Restaurants

5 Men Rob Restaurant, Leave Trail Of Macaroni Salad To Their Hideout

Everyone knows the rules when it comes to a good robbery: Have a gassed-up, solid American getaway car, don't hire the nothing-to-lose guy who's been kicked off of previous heists, and for the love of Pete, do NOT leave any trinkets behind that will expose your whereabouts or plans to the authorities. The top-notch crew that tried to hold up Build-A-Burger in New York State in 2015 almost got everything right, but they failed the last part: staying away after getting away. 

The guys that robbed the joint must have done so in the wee hours after the place closed because the morning shift came in to notice their alarm system and cash register missing. They got on the horn to the cops, who came to investigate and started canvassing the nearby area. It didn't take long for them to find a trail of computer parts and loose change that seemed to have come from the burger place, but they also noticed that the burglars were unable to pass up a 10-pound container of the restaurant's famed macaroni salad. 

Apparently, the suspects were also unable to get the salad from their hands to their mouths because that shit was everywhere. Side salad forensics was called in, and they followed a literal trail of macaroni salad from the burglarized restaurant to the place where the gang was hiding out. The total score that the robbers stole off with? $29 from the register, a bellyful of pasta tossed with mayonnaise, and the stupidest story of capture in the annals of local law enforcement history. 

4 Man Holds Up A Subway Restaurant, Is Caught At Nearby Competitor

When a person chooses to hold up a fast-food chain restaurant, it's always a little boggling to the mind, as most of those places tout how cheap their meal deals are, so why would you expect them to be handling vast sums of money? Maybe you think since it's usually giant corporations, they have bags of cash just ... sitting around at the restaurant? Or maybe desperation just hits a person right at the same time they're choosing their bread and if they want banana peppers or not. Perhaps this is what struck Fredrick Warren of Chicago when he decided to liberate a Subway restaurant register of its money in 2015.

The problem wasn't in his execution -- that part worked. He brandished a knife towards the cashier, and they made good on their desire to not become part of that knife's story. He made off with $186 in cash, but it sounds like he never left with a sandwich. Once the adrenaline of a robbery wears off, it's sure to cause some tummy growls, and that's why he opted to head across the street to one of Subway's main competitors, Potbelly. What he didn't consider is that maybe since he had just robbed a place, he could presumably see from his dining chair at Potbelly, it would have been smarter to, you know, not be around the area? 

Needless to say, the police found him almost as quickly as it took to place their lunch orders. Mr. Warren was still finishing up his sandwich when they rolled in to place him under arrest for armed robbery.

3 The Red Lobster Slapfest

Red Lobster lures in the kind of discerning diner who believes that white socks go with black sneakers and that you're super missing out on the flavor combination of shrimp and ranch. But we forgive them time and time again because GOTDAMN those biscuits. Those flavor queefs of salt and cheddar could stop an imminent missile strike if delivered at the right time. But if you're going there for the supple fruits of the sea, just know you're going to wait too long for a table and that the titular lobster you're seeking is going to look more like a premature crustacean baby.

Speaking of waiting a long time to sit and dine, going to a restaurant on Mother's Day is like the World Series of waiting. You should expect to get to know the people to your left and right on a day like that because you're going to be hanging out for a while. And let's not forget that we're still balls deep in a pandemic.

One unidentified Pennsylvania woman tried to set herself apart from normal humans by absolutely going bananas at the thought of having to wait one more minute for her months-frozen seafood. After three hours of waiting for a table and then to order, she looked to the mantis shrimp for inspiration and began to charge a slap to end all slaps. She was fuming. Lobster bibs and wooden mallets flew like so many archers' arrows. As her belligerence earned her an escort outside, she unleashed an open hand on a female worker, loudly demanding a refund for her wait. She tried to elbow her way back inside (without a mask on, shockingly), but the employee had a rigor mortis grip on her hair in the middle of a cartoon dust-up. 

Things eventually settled, and the cops found her later. The lesson of the story, obviously, is to never do anything nice for your mother.

2 Shooting At Chuck E. Cheese

We know what you're asking: Why would a poorly designed and seemingly perpetually wet play corral running rampant with unattended children be a place that could inspire such violence? Did Chuck come out of his hole in the back and trigger some rodent-biased lunatic? Did the salad fixin's area run out of radishes?

Well, it happened. As gaming and consumption of surprisingly okay-ish pizza went on all around, a female patron shot another woman at the Davenport, Iowa, Chuck E. Cheese's in October of 2020. When the cops arrived on the scene, they found the victim dying (she would be deceased within the hour) and the shooter nowhere to be found. 

The argument reportedly stemmed from a game card that either was missing or stolen. While those things are as good as gold, it's still no excuse to run a person down in a room where children are running around in their socks. Punches were exchanged, Charles Cheese managers were summoned, but in the end, a woman was killed, and the suspect was eventually apprehended and charged with second-degree murder. The specter of Chuck E. Cheese scaring the shit out of kids is even more ominous with a chalk outline blocking the whack-a-mole.

1 Burger King Fire Refund

Have you ever been in the position of having to demand a refund before? What was it for? Did you need the money back, or was it just the general principle of not receiving the services you paid for? How far would you have gone to get that money back? Would you have run into a burning building to get what you felt you deserved? Of course not, because that's stupid.

*checks notes, grimaces audibly*

A woman somewhere someplace found the limits of what she would endure to get the cost of a combo meal back into her pockets. Whatever happened before the video is unclear, but we open the scene with a sport utility vehicle at a Burger King drive-thru. The woman in the SUV seems to be perturbed by something that happened during her transaction. We don't get her name or any backstory. She's just there, in the wild, flaunting her plumage. 

She is yelling at the employees from her window, and they are yelling back at her. They aren't yelling at her because they're angry at her. That may well be true due to events that preceded the video, but the reason they're returning a volley of loud words is because of the simple fact that the building is indeed on fire. This all fell on deaf ears. The woman then gets out of her car and begins to berate the employees for working at said Burger King, all the while ignoring the belching grey plumes of smoke rising from the top of the building. We imagine the employees just pointed at the fully-engulfed restaurant as the reason why they couldn't just stroll in and give this person a refund, but subtlety is a gift, and MechaKaren wasn't blessed with it. Or maybe it was sheer smoke inhalation.

It looks like she never did firewalk into the house of flame-broiled meat to retrieve her six dollars, but her tales of douchebaggery will live on in YouTube playlists for eternity. She should have just waited for her food -- it looks like it for sure would not have gotten cold. 

Justin makes music here. He writes more words here.

Top image: wht_wolf9653/Wiki Commons