New Canaan High School senior Catherine Granito had been sitting at her accustomed corner table at Baskin Robbins last week when she heard a woman’s raised, angry voice from the other end of the ice cream and candy shop. Down near the coolers, a local woman was throwing a fit that would swiftly become the talk of the town, yelling at the teenage workers behind the counter because an ice cream sundae with two hot toppings that her husband had brought home later melted—a sweet treat that had been free as part of a popular buy-one-get-one-free or ‘BOGO’ promotion—and demanding her money back. As captured on surveillance video, she would throw the dessert on the floor behind the counter, then the bag it came in, and returned the following morning to demand a “refund” again, plus gas money for her trouble. “She was loud,” Granito recalled Tuesday from the same table. “You could hear her from across the street.”
Anna Valente, a 1987 NCHS grad who has owned Baskin Robbins for 24 years, considered doing away with the BOGO promotion as a result of the incident, which upset her workers, reasoning that it tends to bring in non-regular customers who are more likely to create such problems.
Instead, Valente turned this week’s promotion into an appreciation night for her employees, and put out a jar to raise money for a New Haven-based nonprofit organization that hosts anger management groups.
