I carefully filled the cake cone from the frozen custard machine, pushing it up at just the right moment to create a perfect ball. Then as I shut off the machine, I pulled the cone away with a circular motion to give it the company’s signature curl on top. It was beautiful, and I was proud of the way it looked, knowing that my customer would be happy.

As I turned away from the machine, I heard, “What the hell is that?”

It was the franchise owner. Baffled, I asked, “What do you mean?”

Snatching the cone from my hand, he replied, “This is too much ice cream; they only get six ounces.” (This was not a corporate policy, but his own.)

With a large kitchen knife, he leveled the ice cream down to the top of the cone, and let it drop into the overflow pan that would later be recycled back into machine. He then turned the handle to refill the cone with a skinny shaft of ice cream. After which he put it on a scale and said, “See, six ounces.”

It looked pathetic, nothing like the mouthwatering posters hanging all over the restaurant. Pointing to one of them, I protested, “But mine looked just like the pictures.”

“I don’t care what the picture looks like—this is the amount we serve!”

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