“Please go to the cafe next door and find my bag”... Absurd call to a dumpling shop [What do you think?]

[The Financial News] A bizarre phone call has come to light in which someone asked the owner of a nearby dumpling shop to check for a bag they had left at a cafe. The caller had never even been a customer at the dumpling shop.
A, who runs a dumpling shop in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, shared on social media on the 6th an incident that happened while the shop was open, saying, “What kind of thing is this?”
According to A, a call came into the shop that day. A answered as usual, “Thank you. This is Paju 00 Son Mandu,” but the caller said, “I left my bag at the ○○ cafe nearby,” and added, “But the cafe isn’t answering the phone, so I looked it up on Naver and called you.”
A told the caller that this was a dumpling shop, not a cafe, but the request continued. The caller asked, “Could you go to the cafe and check whether my bag is there?” and said, “I’m with a child right now, so it’s hard for me to go out. It’s not far, so please help me out.”
A declined, saying it was difficult to leave while the shop was open. A said, “I’m working right now, so I can’t. I’m sorry, but please try calling the cafe again in a little while,” but the caller hung up immediately.
A said they initially thought the caller meant they had left their bag at A’s shop. “At first, I thought they meant they’d left their bag at our shop,” A said. “It turned out they were calling to ask me to find a bag they’d left at someone else’s cafe. For a moment, I thought I’d misheard.”
A added, “This really happened just a little while ago. It was so absurd and funny,” and said, “Our shop isn’t ○○ Cafe; it’s Paju 00 Son Mandu.”
After the story became known, other small-business owners also shared similar experiences.
One small-business owner said they had been asked several times to check on nearby businesses for someone else. “I’ve had people call asking me to check whether the neighboring pig’s feet restaurant’s door was open because they weren’t answering the phone. Someone else thought they’d dropped their wallet near our shop and asked me to go out and look for it, and I’ve also had a call asking me to pick up cigarettes they’d left on a bench at the shop next door,” they said. “And none of those three people were even our customers.”
Another small-business owner, who said they run a clothing store, had a similar experience. “It happens to me from time to time, too. I’ve even been asked to package up a few rolls of gimbap from the kimbap shop next door,” they said.
Online commenters reacted, saying, “How can you so brazenly ask a busy shop owner to do that?”, “The customer is king? It’s getting harder and harder to run a small business,” and “Do they not give it a second thought?”


[email protected] Han Seung-gon Reporter