The egregious taster spoon

Like many ice cream stores, we offer samples of our flavors using little taster spoons.  And like many ice cream stores, we have a receptacle near our ice cream for the disposal of used taster spoons.  You would think this would be a simple system.  Oh, but it is mischievous and dastardly system meant to confuse and deceive the customer!  Story time:

A group of 2 mothers and two daughters came in one day.  One of the teen girls asked if we had smoothies.  I turned around and pointed to a section of our menu dedicated entirely to smoothies and told her that I could in fact make a smoothie.  She ordered one.  When I turned around to hand it to her, I noticed that all other people in their party had a taster spoon in their hands.  I know I did not give them those spoons, so my only conclusion was that they took them from the trash receptacle for used spoons that clearly says,"TRASH SPOONS" on it.  I said, "Where did you get those taster spoons?!"  "From right there," said one of the mothers as she nodded in the direction of the spoons that went in other people's mouths.  She said it as she was dipping "her" taster spoon into her daughter's smoothie.  "Those are trash spoons.  They have been used" I said, in hopes of stopping them from contaminating the freshly made smoothie.  The mother looked at me incredulously and said, "Well we thought they were for sampling!"  "It does say TRASH SPOONS on it,"  I pointed out.  Why they were mad at me makes me incredulous!  This group obviously had a hard time reading or using their powers of observation.

And they aren't alone!  I've had other people dig a dirty spoon out of our bucket and hand it to me for a sample of one of our freshly made flavors.  Why would we put spoons on their side, where they can't get to the ice cream?  Wouldn't it make more sense to skip that step of passing the spoon to us and just have the spoons on the side with the ice cream?  Oh, wait, that's what we do!

I also had a man try to get me to re-use his taster spoon!  I gave him a sample of a flavor he inquired about.  He then asked to sample a different one, and as I was dipping the new taster spoon in the second flavor, he handed me his used one and said in all sincerity, "Here, you can use this one so you don't have to get another one dirty."  I just stared at him blankly.  Was he serious?  Did he really me to use the taster spoon that had just been INSIDE his mouth in a fresh batch of our ice cream?  You gotta be kidding me!

One would think a little white plastic spoon would be innocent and not cause any issues, but that spoon is quite crafty!