Suppose you order eighty shopping baskets. Apple green, just like the color of your waistcoat and scarf. Excellent baskets: sturdy, durable, easy to clean. But then you suddenly only count 78. The next day you get stuck at 70. Before you know it there are only 25 left.
Message on Facebook
This happened to the employees of Plus Tubbergen this week. Owner Niké Pleijhuis was very disappointed and shared the story on Facebook. That same day, half the village knew about the basket exodus.
Wout Stokkelaar is manager of the filling team. Although the shopping baskets are not his responsibility, he is well aware of the matter. He saw with his own eyes how the basket pile suddenly grew larger a day after the Facebook message.
“Every evening we count them again,” says Wout. “Suddenly a few had joined. When was that? Exactly one day after the Facebook post.”
Bandage?
That can’t be a coincidence, can it? But it gets even better, because the pile just kept growing: “They come in in sections, about ten a day,” says the filling team leader. “I think people saw the post on Facebook and that’s why they’re bringing them back.”
Just to be clear: we don’t know whether it concerns one or more perpetrators, or whether something else is going on. In any case, the chance that the baskets will be stolen again seems small. Nobody wants to be spotted with such a gadget in the bicycle bag. Not now that Tubbergen is under the spell of the basket mystery.
Wout also expects the stack to be complete again in the foreseeable future. Otherwise, Plus turns again to the social medium that has (in all probability) reunited the eighty baskets.
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