Wes Stott got the tattoo a few days after a stranger posted his face in a Facebook group and asked the town of Milton, Florida, to find him. It’s a cake pop on his forearm with the word “thief” across it, and he picked the design himself.
The cake pop that started it cost $4. He took it off a porch on Grandview Drive while delivering a package, because there was a pink cooler by the door under a sign that began “Treat Yourself,” and he read that the way most drivers would. People leave snacks out for delivery workers all the time, usually with a note saying about the same thing.
The porch
The porch belongs to a home bakery that sells sourdough and cake pops on the honor system. There’s a wreath on the door and a fiddle-leaf fig beside the cooler, and on the cooler’s front panel, a QR code with the word “REVIEW” printed over it. On the side is a smaller box marked “Pay Here,” with an arrow pointing down at the slot.
Stott says he didn’t see the box. He opened the lid, saw that some of the wrapped treats were labeled free, took one cake pop, and went to his next stop. The doorbell camera recorded it.
@xyunnews Florida Bakery Publicly Shames Amazon Driver Who Mistook a $4 Cake Pop for a Free Snack#news #typ #cake #foryour #amazon ♬ original sound – xyunnews
The post
The husband of the woman who runs the bakery took a still from that footage and put it in a local Facebook group. “If anyone knows this Amazon driver, please tell him to come back and pay my wife for the cake pop he took,” he wrote. He closed by asking anyone who’d bought from the bakery before to follow its page and leave a review, with a free brown butter sourdough cookie on the next visit for anyone who did.
The post had Stott’s face in it and the name of his employer, and it was asking a town to go looking for him over a cake pop.
He found it before the town did. He could have left it alone, since the still was grainy and Milton has a lot of Amazon drivers, but he put his name in the comments instead. “Im the driver the entire thing was my not paying attention,” he wrote. “I was in a hurry and should’ve paid better attention but nothing was done out of malicious intent.” He asked people not to let this ruin a business.
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Five dollars
His wife, Breanna, sent the bakery $5 through Google Pay in the same thread, a dollar more than the cake pop cost, with the note “For for the cake pop.” She posted the receipt so there could be no argument about whether it had happened, and wrote that she was terrified Amazon would fire her husband. They have four children.
He replied to her in the comments. “Yeah, let me apologize for someone stealing from me and calling them out. Make it make sense.”
That was after the payment had cleared.
What the town did
@cakepopthief850 #CakePopKing #CakePopGate #cakepopthief ♬ original sound – Cake Pop King
The comments under the post turned on the bakery. People pointed out that “treat yourself” means free everywhere else in America and that there was no visible price. Others called it bullying, and someone called for a boycott. By the time a TikTok news account picked up the story and pushed it to 4.8 million views, the bakery had deleted the post and turned off comments on its page. The bakery has said it intends to keep operating and that its prices are displayed.
Stott opened a TikTok account and called it @cakepopthief850. It gained 140,000 followers within days, and a recap of the story on another account has passed 22 million views. On August 26 he went back to the Facebook group where this began and posted a thank-you. “I never thought eating a cake pop would change my life so drastically.”
Then he went to a tattoo shop.
The cooler on Grandview Drive is still out, still says treat yourself, and still has the review code on the front. Breanna Stott’s $5 is still in the bakery’s account, and nobody there has said her husband isn’t a thief.
