A thief has stolen 510kg of meat (worth about $7,000) in a callous robbery, leaving a small town butcher shop struggling to fill Christmas orders.
Glasshouse Country Meats owners Dale and Lisa Wagner are now working all hours to ensure Christmas isn't ruined for their customers.
The loot, including 16 whole hams, was stolen from their cold room in Queensland's Glasshouse Mountains on the Sunshine Coast early on Saturday.
The Christmas Grinch – who appeared to be acting on his own – broke the store's lock and then used a rubbish bin to transport loads of meat to his car – and it was all caught on CCTV.
The Wagners have 40 minutes of video footage of the man taking his time and casually making three runs from the cool room to his car and back.
Glasshouse Country Meats owners Dale and Lisa Wagner (pictured) work all hours to make sure Christmas isn't ruined for their customers
“I have no idea what he's going to do with it, I assume he's sold it,” Ms Wagner told Ny Breaking Australia on Tuesday evening.
If he did, he did it privately when she looked on Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree to see if large loads of meat were being unloaded but found nothing.
She said the thief will need a lot of refrigeration to keep it cold, if he hasn't thrown it all away already.
'Hopefully we catch him, all I want is for him to pay for what he did. Most people are raised to be honest, it's just really sad that this happened,” Ms Wagner said.
The couple have been running the business for about six years and have built a strong reputation in that time.
“We know most of our customers by name,” she says.
Those customers, and even people who aren't customers, have reached out to the Wagners in recent days to tell them how sorry they were to hear what happened.
This kindness and the efforts of the police have somewhat restored her faith in humanity.
'I am very impressed with the police. Three of them (from the Sunshine Coast Property Crime Taskforce) are working on it,” she said.
Ms Wagner has been surprised by how much interest the story has generated, with 700,000 views and 1,700 shares on their website. Facebook page since she wrote about the burglary.
“To our valued customer who came to our cold room at 3:01 this morning and decided he couldn't wait for the store to open,” she wrote.
'You brought over 250 kilos of ham and 260 kilos of meat. Unfortunately you forgot to pay for the meat!'
She then wrote: 'After what happened to us this weekend, we are overwhelmed by the support from our wonderful customers and from people we have never met…
“Dale is cooking more hams to replace the stolen hams.”
The Wagners have 40 minutes of video footage of the man (photo) taking his time and casually making three runs from the cool room to his car and back again
The thief (pictured) stole 510 kilos of meat – worth about $7,000 – in a callous robbery
Ms. Wagner said cooking the hams “is a great honor for him. He starts work at four in the morning. It's a big process to get the final product.”
Although the store is insured, it will take a while for that money to come in, and on Tuesday the Wagners were annoyed at having to pay a bill for meat stolen from them.
The thief hasn't been caught yet, but this Grinch hasn't managed to ruin the Christmas spirit of the Wagners and the customers of Glasshouse Country Meats.
“I'm not going to let him break me,” Mrs. Wagner said. “It is what it is, but you just have to persevere.”