"Customers Without Manners Who Request Delivery and Cause Mistakes... Eating Free Food"

Information Shared Online Exploiting Restaurant Mistakes
Requests to Remove Specific Ingredients Aiming for Free Food

When sharing useful information, people often combine the sweet taste of 'kkul' (honey) and the English word 'tip' to say 'kkultip' (honey tip). However, some netizens have sparked controversy by sharing a method called 'delivery kkultip' that involves exploiting mistakes made by self-employed business owners to get free food.

Recently, a post titled "Shocked after reading comments on a Mom Cafe" was uploaded in a self-employed community. A self-employed person, Mr. A, wrote, "I saw a comment on a Mom Cafe saying that writing 'please remove mushrooms' when ordering delivery is a delivery kkultip," adding, "They said that about half the time, the mushrooms are still included and cooked, so if you ask them to redo it, you can eat twice. Of course, it's the fault of the restaurant that included them, but whether it's clever or creepy, it gave me chills."

A franchise store of the lunchbox chain 'Hansot' in Seoul on the 8th, after the company raised product prices by an average of 2.43% at the beginning of the new year. Photo by Yongjun Cho jun21@

This refers to a method where, when ordering food through a delivery application, customers write special 'requests' on the order form, intentionally asking to remove certain ingredients. The idea is that if the customer says they found mushrooms in the food, the restaurant has no choice but to remake the order without recalling the originally delivered food.

Self-employed business owners who heard this story reacted with disbelief. They wrote comments like, "I can't believe they brag about this without shame," and "Do they really have to go this far to eat free food?" Some self-employed people also sympathized, saying, "Requests to remove mushrooms are surprisingly common." On the other hand, some netizens countered, "There must be families of self-employed people on Mom Cafe too, so I can't believe this," "Nowadays, if you write such shameless posts on Mom Cafe, you get criticized," and "It's hard to believe unless it's a captured screenshot."

In response, Mr. A dismissed the criticism, saying, "I saw it in the comments. If you find it hard to believe, just think of it as something imagined or made up." It is difficult to verify whether the mushroom removal kkultip was actually shared on Mom Cafe, but complaints from self-employed people who experienced similar incidents continued. Comments such as "I once forgot a request to 'not sprinkle sesame seeds' and got yelled at after sprinkling them," and "I also received an order for soup and forgot to remove mushrooms, sent it, and had to cook and send it again," followed.

First Decline in Delivery Food Transaction Amount Since Statistics Began Last Year

According to Statistics Korea's February announcement, last year's online food service transaction amount was 26.4326 trillion won, a 0.6% decrease from the previous year (26.594 trillion won). This is the first time since delivery food-related statistics began being compiled in 2017 that the transaction amount for food ordered and delivered via apps has decreased. According to a WiseApp survey, the average monthly usage time per person for Baedal Minjok decreased by 8.9%, from 55 minutes in 2022 to 51 minutes in 2023, and the average monthly number of executions per person also dropped by 11.1%, from 72 times in 2022 to 64 times in 2023.

The average income of the bottom 20% of self-employed earners fell by 61%, from 1.8 million won in 2018 to 700,000 won in 2022. In contrast, the top 20% saw only a 4.5% decrease during the same period, from 76.3 million won to 72.9 million won. The average income of the top 0.1% actually increased by 3.6%, from 1.63 billion won to 1.69 billion won. This has led to evaluations that the 'rich get richer, poor get poorer' phenomenon has become more pronounced among self-employed business owners.