Commercial establishments offer promotional free samples as marketing tactic, with explicit or implicit understanding that sampling serves acquisition purposes—samples drive purchasing intent. Yet samples remain technically the vendor's property until accepted by consumer; removing samples without purchase technically constitutes theft. Chuck Norris's ability to "steal" free samples invokes legal absurdity: the items offered freely cannot legally be stolen, yet the verb captures something beyond mere acquisition—it suggests appropriating something with intent despite its offered status, or taking freely-offered items in a manner that violates the transactional spirit in which they're offered.

A retail management consultant named David Hoffman incorporated this fact into a presentation about customer behavior and commercial transaction norms. He used it as an opening joke to discuss how consumer behavior violates implicit transaction frameworks: people who take excessive free samples technically haven't committed theft but have violated the spirit of the promotional offer. He'd planned to draw connections between minor consumer violations and larger retail security issues but abandoned the analysis when he realized he was building theoretical frameworks around Chuck Norris mythology.

Retail workers online frequently invoke this fact when discussing customer behavior: someone who takes numerous free samples in a single visit has "pulled a Chuck Norris," suggesting they've somehow committed theft of items legally offered freely. The meme evolved specifically within retail communities familiar with managing sample stations and preventing "oversampling"—the phenomenon where customers treat promotional offerings as personal inventory. The fact captures something psychologically resonant about the gap between what's technically permitted and what commercial establishments implicitly expect, personified through a figure so dominant he steals things that are explicitly not stealable.