'Choco Pie theft' dispute heats up: ‘Like leaving fish with a cat’ vs. ‘decade-old custom’

A Choco Pie is at the center of a workplace theft dispute. Korea Times file

The so-called “Choco Pie theft case” has turned into a heated legal and public debate, with a logistics company manager and a security guard clashing over whether a snack taken from an office refrigerator was theft or a long-standing workplace practice.

The incident occurred at just after 4 a.m. on Jan. 18 last year in the office of a logistics company in Wanju, North Jeolla Province. A security guard took a Choco Pie priced at 450 won ($0.33) and another snack priced at 600 won from an office refrigerator, worth a total of 1,050 won.

The logistics company manager saw the scene through a CCTV feed linked to his phone and reported the security guard to police for theft.

Prosecutors deemed the act met the legal criteria for theft but was minor in scale, indicting the security guard in a summary trial. The court fined him 50,000 won, but he appealed, arguing he should be acquitted so as to avoid losing his job. The first trial court upheld the fine, and the case is now before an appellate court.

'Breach of trust, not a trivial matter'

Online users quickly labeled the security guard “a modern-day Jean Valjean,” criticizing the manager for pursuing a court case over a snack.

However, the manager insists the matter is about trust and security.

“Jean Valjean? How can it be justified that an employee responsible for security left his post and took someone else’s belongings?” he said in a phone interview with the Hankook Ilbo, struggling to contain his anger.

“Why am I, the victim, the one being attacked when someone else did wrong?” the manager said. “I was shocked to see a security guard, whose job is to safeguard the premises, walk into another person’s office as if it were his own.”

According to the manager, the logistics company’s office, affiliated with Hyundai Motor, is located on the second floor of a building inside the factory grounds. Security guards are stationed around the plant’s perimeter and on the first floor of buildings in shifts, providing 24-hour surveillance.

He argued that he never gave permission for security staff to access food in the office refrigerator. “I used to trust the security guards and only locked the office door,” he said. “Now I can only guess how often they came and went. For more than a decade, it was like leaving fish with a cat.”

He added that he realized what had been happening only after installing a CCTV camera a month or two before the incident.

Jeonju District Court / Korea Times file

‘It was common practice’

The security guard, however, denied intent throughout the investigation and trial. “I was told by delivery drivers that it was fine to take snacks from the refrigerator, and for more than 10 years not only I but also my fellow guards had been eating snacks from the office as a matter of routine," he said.

Dozens of his colleagues even submitted statements to the court backing this claim.

The court in the first trial sided with the manager, noting that the guard's experience and job responsibilities meant he should have recognized that transport drivers lacked authority to grant such permission.

Ongoing dispute

At the first hearing of the appeal on Sept. 18, Judge Kim Do-hyung of the Jeonju District Court’s Criminal Division looked over the case files and muttered with a wry smile, “Do we really need to go this far in such a harsh world?”

The manager said he had already warned the security firm after once catching another guard entering the office. The firm promised to caution its employees, but he said the guard entered without permission just days later.

“When I first saw the CCTV footage, I didn’t even know whether he took a Choco Pie or a custard,” A recalled. “What matters is that he walked into an empty office and took something without consent.”

The manager added, “I’m human too—do you think I want to ruin a young man’s future? But (he) never offered a real explanation for why he did it, and above all, he never showed the sincerity of someone truly apologetic.”

The guard’s defense attorney countered that the case may have been pushed to trial because of his client’s union activity. In a statement, the union alleged that incidents at Hyundai’s Jeonju plant are routinely reported up to the prime contractor, Hyundai Motor, and suggested the case was “orchestrated to intimidate union members" regardless of the manager's wishes.

The manager dismissed the claim as “a piece of fiction that distracts from the real issue,” saying he had no knowledge of the guard's union status or ties to Hyundai.

Hyundai Motor itself also distanced from the case. A company official said, “There are thousands of subcontractors, and it is impossible to know everything that happens inside them. We only learned of the case through media reports, and it is a matter to be resolved between the parties involved.”

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.