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Digital EditionCheesy Toast Coverage: A Creative Insurance Solution to a Feathered Fiasco
Roger Crombie is a United Kingdom-based columnist for Risk & Insurance®. He can be reached at [email protected].
Often, we focus in these pages on big-deal insurance matters. The best brokers. Innovative reinsurers. Major events and significant losses. And rightly so. Today, though, a very much smaller report — the premium per policy is $1.30 — that illustrates just as well the underlying principles and benefits of insurance.
You may recall a 1970 novella called “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” written by Richard Bach. Its protagonist was a seagull that flew for the love of flying, rather than the never-ending search for food. “He was not bone and feather, but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all,” that sort of thing. The book sold more than a million copies despite being utter bilge.
It was propaganda for the flying rats that increasingly plague British towns and cities — and maybe your town too. My nearest neighbours are herring gulls, but behaviourally they might as well be seagulls. They nest on the roof immediately above my apartment.
I despise them.
Several have attacked me physically on my balcony. One tore an ice cream out of my hand, surely a capital offense. I have met the enemy, and it has no control over its digestive tract. I’ve seen a gull eat a squirrel. Whole. Others have attacked and harmed babies. One inflicted a wound on a man so appalling that I dare not detail it, in case junior actuaries are reading.
It’s not just me that’s affected; a sandwich business in Scotland is to offer “seagull insurance” to “counter the increasing numbers of dive-bombing birds stealing food from terrified customers.”
That’s right: Seagulls are terrorists.
The Cheesy Toast Shack in St. Andrews announced this summer that the cost of replacing sandwiches to “victims of gull thefts” might force the Shack out of business. (Cheesy Toast is selfexplanatory but can be divisive: A visiting American friend stormed out of a restaurant in disgust when he sampled it.)
The victims apparently make it easy for the flying thugs, holding up their cheesy refreshments for exhibition to the brain-dead on social media. The birds swoop down and confiscate the $10 snacks. The victims then pile back in and demand another sandwich, at the Shack’s expense.
Owners Sam and Kate Larg “don’t know how long it’s sustainable to keep giving away lunch after lunch for free.” Charges for snack replacement thus loom.
The Largs are considering offering seagull insurance, or in lay terms, sandwich insurance. Either way, it’s £1 a go. Pay the premium, have your snack snatched, and another sandwich is yours, no charge. One imagines that the Shack’s claims process will be less rigorous than that of other insurers.
The obvious solution is to eradicate the seagulls, which might not be eco-friendly, but would improve life for the rest of us. Unfortunately, in the UK, killing wildlife or pets earns up to five years in jail and an unlimited fine, per seagull. Sandwich insurance will probably keep the Largs in business.
That’s what insurance does. No matter if your loss involves a cheese sandwich, or something far, far less horrible like an earthquake, when life takes a turn for the worse, insurance is there to protect you. &
