You don’t seem to see things like this happening at McDonald’s or Wendy’s. But something about Burger King appears to send coupon users flying into a rage.
An Iowa man has become the latest in an increasingly long line of Burger King customers arrested in connection with a coupon-related confrontation. And this one was caught on camera.
Police in Cedar Rapids say 34-year-old Jeremiah Wenzel was arrested last Wednesday, accused of hitting a Burger King employee in the head with a cell phone. “The suspect allegedly attempted to use a coupon but the store didn’t honor it,” police spokesman Greg Buelow told Coupons in the News. “He became upset and threw his phone at the employee.”
And the whole confrontation was captured on camera, in a video that’s going viral after it was posted online yesterday.
By the time the unnamed bystander started recording, the dispute was well underway. You can watch for yourself by clicking to play the video above (and a warning, it contains strong language). The video shows a man identified as Wenzel, accompanied by his mother and another woman, inside a Burger King a few miles away from his home.
Amid much shouting in front of and behind the counter, Wenzel is seen throwing his phone at an employee, who announces that he’s calling police. Wenzel responds that he will get a lawyer to sue the employee.
Things take a turn for the worse as Wenzel’s mother discovers it was her phone, and not his, that he threw behind the counter. “You threw your phone at him?” she asks. “My phone!” she realizes. “You dumba**, that’s my phone that he threw!”
“All for these,” the woman recording the video says incredulously, holding some coupons up to the camera.
And then things get even more heated.
After the employee tells Wenzel “you’re not getting your phone back,” Wenzel is seen taking matters into his own hands. He slides over the counter, retrieves the phone, and is seen whacking an employee over the head with it before sliding back over the counter and leaving the restaurant.
The employee shouts that he’s bleeding, and everyone runs outside to get Wenzel’s license plate number. He was arrested a short time later at his home, and charged with assault causing bodily injury.
The precise nature of the coupon dispute that started this whole commotion is not known – whether Wenzel was trying to use invalid coupons, or the employees simply wouldn’t accept them for some other reason. Commenters on similar stories here on Coupons in the News have previously alleged that Burger King is notorious for refusing coupons. “Burger King doesn’t like to honor their coupons, period,” one recent commenter complained. “They just take them and don’t apply them, (or) ask harshly and rudely why you want to use a coupon.”
That could help to explain why Burger King seems to be the site of so many coupon confrontations that end in arrests. In one of the most notorious cases back in 2016, a Wisconsin woman and her daughter were arrested after the woman was told she couldn’t use multiple coupons in a transaction, so she sicced her daughter on the cashier for “disrespecting” her. In 2018, a Florida man was arrested after he allegedly grabbed a cashier by the wrist “and began to pull her over the counter” when his coupons were refused. Two other incidents, in South Carolina and Connecticut, didn’t involve actual violence, but customers in both cases were arrested after threatening gunplay.
In Burger King’s defense, all of those incidents seemed to involve customers who didn’t “get” coupons – they were trying to combine multiple coupons on a single item, for example, or use coupons that stated they were only valid in certain locations. And in the Connecticut case, the suspect was trying to use a coupon for a breakfast item after breakfast was no longer being served.
Regardless of who’s at fault, though, there just seems to be something about Burger King and coupons that gets people particularly worked up.
As for Wenzel, he’s due to make his initial appearance in court on February 5th. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a fine of up to $1,875.
To quote a wise coupon-bearing observer – “all for these.”
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