I work in food services and just yesterday a temp was fired for “stealing” leftovers that were going to be composted. Like excuse me? They could at least have gotten a warning since they were new not to mention its a cruel policy to begin with.
Fucking Casey’s. Bad food, advertising on the pumps that can’t be muted, and now this. Good thing there’s alternatives where I live.
Imma need to see bodycam footage and his hr files. If he was grazing the salad bar again, he’s toast.
You just said salad bar, they don’t have toast at salad bars, croutons maybe, I mean that’s stale toast they toast more traditionally, but get your story straight.
Yep! Call me a skeptic on these stories. I’ve seen too many, “I was fired because I clocked in 5 minutes late!”
Only for it to come out that while they were fired for “being late”, it was the last straw because of all their HR complaints for sexually harassing dozens of women, offensive humor, and for creating a toxic atmosphere.
Look at you giving employers the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, just like I’m sure all of the president’s companies fired people for totally legitimate reasons that they came up with after the fact when they got called on it.
Of course his name is Joe so he must be a sex offender. Holy shit you have issues pal
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I remember once the heat broke in the middle of winter at my work. I wore a unbranded brownish orange beanie because it was effing cold. I was told to remove it because hats were against dress code. When a customer asked me why I wasn’t wearing my beanie I told them the truth. Management told me to take it off because it violated dress code. I was taken to the back for a disciplinary meeting for being “unprofessional”. Then let me wear the fucking hat if talking about not wearing it is making you look bad.
I want to know who narc’d on Joe.
That person deserves an ass beating.
You should let the pantry know as well. They can be a force that could change this. They can let folks that go to the pantry know not to go to those kind of gas stations and also have them call corporate.
I mean the food pantry is apparently the food pantry in creston illinois if that helps
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All I can tell you is it’s in DeKalb county most likely, sorry I don’t know more than that Possibly also in creston
Sorry for asking for specifics. I’m wondering why my comment was deleted not by me but say it is.
Spez did it
A manager doesn’t have discretion to dispose of out of date stock in any other way than putting it in the bin?
Why would you even have the position of Manager then?
The general corporate answer is that the misappropriation of waste is theft. They’ll try to propose that Joe might hide boxes of cookies to take them, causing disproportionate waste. Giving them to the pantry instead of keeping them for himself is immaterial to their rules.
Realistically, some companies move near-out-of-date products to the sale rack and then offer them up to pantries after they pass their best-by date. They should easily be able to look at waste and sales here and make a judgment call. I’m betting someone local had a beef with Joe, didn’t get their preferred day off, and turned him in.
Handled correctly, corporate would have donated a shit ton to the food pantry, taken a tax break, improved the community and told Joe to cut it out if they really cared.
Yep. This is exactly why. It makes logical sense if they only thing that matters is profit. Several places that I worked would allow the public to come in and request these “about to be tossed.” items to take for free. You had sign up, provide ID, and come right at closing time, though, to do it. The employees were not allowed to do this for the reason rumba gave.
Didn’t Eskimos throw sociopaths off cliffs?
Why doesn’t the conversation end there?
Begging your pardon, but Eskimo is considered pejorative. The people in question called themselves Inuit.
Not considered.
Is.
As far as I’m aware of, no.
and because capitalism
You think they would if we asked nicely.
It could happen, but think of the poor cliffs, they stood for eons just to witness such violence and be unable to partake in it themselves.
I don’t know, most of the people I know named Cliff are down for some crazy shit, especially if they really need the money.
named Cliff are down for some crazy shit,
That’s just down right cr…
Fuck that’s a good god damned point.
Not too many cliffs were they’re from. Now ice floes OTOH, lots. And it was the elderly. And rarely.
And rarely.
that’s because they didn’t have my relatives :), I pine for the ice floes
If you don’t trust someone to appropriately handle waste, you don’t trust them enough to be a manager.
Giving them to the pantry instead of keeping them for himself is immaterial to their rules.
This is prime executive laziness. In this case, that should warrant an investigation by upper management. If the regional director fired an otherwise productive manager for what really would amount to ‘not getting a receipt for tax purposes,’ one has to question whether they’ve been promoted beyond their capabilities. Rules are for people who aren’t trusted to apply critical thinking to their job, i.e. relatively new minimum wage workers. Managers are supposed to be people with enough education, experience, and established trust to make decisions on behalf of the company. If they aren’t trusted, they shouldn’t have been made a manager.
If you don’t trust someone to appropriately handle waste
They trusted him for 10 years, presumably until someone turned him in.
This is prime executive laziness. … not getting a receipt for tax purposes,
What if they were against giving the food away? what if their worry is that someone would hide the stuff till it expires to give more away. It’s not a very neighborly line of thinking, but it’s also not unreasonable.
. Managers are supposed to be people with enough education, experience, and established trust to make decisions on behalf of the company.
No way, in corporate land, the managers are there to enforce the rules. They’re there to order the food, make sure the staff comes in, make sure the food gets thrown away if that’s policy. Most managers don’t get the discretion to break protocol when they feel like it.
If they aren’t trusted, they shouldn’t have been made a manager.
*Well they apparently solved that problem
edit* added a line
What if they were against giving the food away?
Then they’re malevolent, and thus unqualified for their position. If someone are faced with the choice between giving something away in a way that can benefit them, and just setting the thing on fire purely to prevent someone else possibly benefitting, and they choose the latter, they are unqualified for any executive position. Even if one assigns no value to the potential of helping others, they are actively choosing to lose out on almost certain benefits (through tax benefits, PR, reduction of thefts of necessity, which are appreciably likely to come from their store’s saleable stock rather than their waste) to prevent possible, but improbable, losses. That is actively choosing a worse outcome for the company they are ostensibly working to serve. Failure.
what if their worry is that someone would hide the stuff till it expires to give more away.
Then either:
A) The person is committing malfeasance and can be audited, as all managers should be anyway, and fired for actual harm, (which is still unlikely to cause enough damages to actually be a threat to the company, because if it caused an appreciable dip in profits, they’d fire them for incompetence without even needing a detailed audit)
or B) they can demonstrate to the management they are doing something that actually works out in the favor of the company, and the halfwits would be firing someone who found a way to turn trash into money.It is idiotic mismanagement to throw away someone with years of experience because they might do something that most people wouldn’t think of. Even an unpaid intern has enough access such that they might choose to misappropriate something of value. If you fire everyone who might take advantage of their access for misappropriation, there will be no employees, just a building stripped even of its copper wiring because you couldn’t trust a security guard to have keys.
Most managers don’t get the discretion to break protocol when they feel like it.
This is a statement of current failure, not a reason not to improve. I’m saying something like ‘It’s a bad idea to cut your hands with a knife,’ and your response is something like, ‘But in all the kitchens I’ve worked in, people cut themselves all the time.’ Something bad doesn’t become good just because it’s common. If a job can be accomplished just blindly following a list of prescribed rules and procedures, that’s a minimum wage job or a job in need of automation, not an executive position for a human.
Don’t go to work in a corporate enterprise :) You’ll end up sorely disappointed in most places.
I have been. But if you finish ‘it is how it is’ with ‘and so it shall always be,’ you’ve written off any chance of anything being better than it is, right at this very moment, and might as well kill yourself.
you go first, i’ll just find other work :)
When I was in retail, we were required to destroy anything we threw away.
If we had a warranty issue on a product, the manufacturer would usually just ship us a new one because it was cheaper than a repair, and we’d have to provide proof of destruction. My favorite was for kayaks. We had to mail back a portion of the body at least 1 square foot in area that included the serial number stamp.
Yeah, that’s just how waste works.
Big Box retail, we used to have to ship most everything non-salable back to depot. The trucks would unload 10 pallets and load one back up every couple weeks. The depo would trash the stuff with proof and get the credits from the manufacturer.
I worked in fast food too, some of the managers would allow some waste to be taken, but it would have been their asses if the DM’s caught wind. Slippery slope from accidentally cooking too much chicken to making enough to feed your family dinner. Had one manager once who traded food with Little Caesers and we all had pizza that night, it was awesome.
We had this substitute manager once, she was from a busy store. They always sent the chicken guy home at 7 to save cash and had the back line cook throw down another tray if things got low. Before they sent the chicken guy home, she had him put down two trays. That’s 8 chickens worth of parts. On a busy night, we might maybe sell a half a tray between 7 and close.
hey, Rumba, can you tray up the chicken and finish cleaning if I send C home? Yeah sure. (C was always clean AF) I go back there and there were 2 fryers full. Ohhh SHIT.
End of the night we sold maybe half a tray. She came back all worried. Hey, we have kinda WAY too much chicken, I’ll be here for a couple more days, any chance you can help me spread the waste out between now and Friday?
I got to take home a trashbag with 36 pieces. And just made almost exactly what we’d need for the next couple days. It was down to breading/cooking a few pieces at a time but we made it work.
Had one manager once who traded food with Little Caesers and we all had pizza that night, it was awesome.
Give the manager an “esprit de corps” account to charge the “loss” to. That way they can track the costs and decide if it’s worth it.
Believe they can also get a tax write off for part of the cost.
any restaurant that doesn’t do the family meal is just asking for food theft. your esprit de corps account proves it
For sure, a company could do that. Waste and shrink are problems that growing companies universally experience at some point. When they expand to the point where they have departments dedicated to reducing those losses, they end up with varying levels of strict policies to combat it.
My current company is a few hundred, which is a child company of many thousands. In my companies initial incarnation, before my time, they issued work credit cards to people to deal with software subscriptions and hardware needs. They ran a skeleton IT staff who just knitted everything together that people bought.
until;
People start buying their groceries on the cards. It was ‘snacks’. Before long it was out of fucking control and they had to pull everyone’s cards and slap the hands of even some of the management.
By the time I got there, I had to be read the riot act to get a card with enough space to provision basic equipment.
Our parent company takes weeks, requires seperate accounts and PO’s for any transactions what-so-ever, I’m not sure what they faced, but I suspect it’s kind of like those youtube videos where you see the guy throw the basketball overhead backward and full court and it goes in and everyone in frame absolutely loses their mind, you have to assume they had been at it for hours for the reaction to be that insane.
I was thinking simpler. Just give the decision power to managers, but allow them to use it to reward/celebrate their employees.
I’ve had two credit cards for work in my career. On one I bought a book (one single book). On the other one I bought . . . nothing - not one single thing. But I was required to get it because I once paid for required training on my own card then put in for reimbursement (as I was told to do). Corporate went nuts because I didn’t do it their way - use the company card I didn’t have at the time.
Legally speaking it cannot be theft. Once it has been discarded you give up all legal rights to it.
California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988)
The Supreme Court held that trash placed outside the curtilage for public collection is abandoned. But the ruling explicitly notes that trash on private property remains protected and is not automatically abandoned.
Courts repeatedly cite Greenwood to show that location and owner intent matter.
This is why workplace trash is not public trash.
Corporate joints, they figure if they don’t waste the food people would be motivated to see food is wasted that could be used. And it would prevent managers from slipping in expired food they aren’t supposed to use anyway because they are under pressure to lower waste costs. So they throw out food rather than let anyone have it.
Plus if you feed someone, they aren’t going to be buying food. It’s completely just a theoretical self serving philosophy, that’s why I refuse to work for corporate joints like that.
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Offloading of actual work + the illusion of power over your situation
The biggest impediment to donating foodstuffs by grocery stores is most often governmental food safety regulations. A store just can’t take foods it needs to pull off the self and donate it. It can be onerous to get the special permission to do things like this. And yes, management is too lazy to jump through all the hoops and put out the effort to try as it often stands.
I highly recommend working with your local government to make it easier for a grocery store to donate foods.
Maybe outside the US, but we have Good Samaritan laws at the federal level to expedite charitable donations from corporations. Any rules you may have encountered, in the US, were put in place voluntarily by the company.
Source: Food Safety Manager that went to war over this exact issue with a pizza hut franchise and won.
Yeah, most excuses I hear are really just excuses. Even had a shop refuse to sell me something after its best before date despite it being on the shelf at a reduced price. They said its illegal to sell it to me - no it isn’t, there is another shop just round the corner which makes that their entire business model by selling reduced stuff past its best before date.
Had I been feeling more argumentative I would have been tempted to leave the money on the counter and just walk off with it. Yes it is kinda stealing, but no one is going to enforce that. “So you are saying he left the money on the counter and walked off with it? Yeah stop wasting our time”
Only because we let corporations write off the value of the food they donate to charity, off their taxes. Canada does not let them do that, and they have a lot less donations to food banks as a result.
It’s all quid pro quo stuff, you notice food banks make you prove you live in the area with a piece of mail, they aren’t giving it out to anyone, it’s a charity that harvests tax write offs.
Lots of rules like this in large corporate outfits.
If you think this is crazy look into musical instrument disposal policies. It’s disgusting
I tried but got a lot of hits on positive sounding stuff. I believe you, I just don’t see what you’re seeing.
So the manager in the original post probably brought some day old baked goods that would have been thrown in the garbage. The gas station I worked at had a lock on the bin so people wouldn’t easily rummage through the bins for things like day old goods. Because it causes problems downstream to clean up after people dumpster dive. The other thing that can happen is something dumb happens somewhere, and some senior management (maybe even VP) sends out a memo that bans anyone from doing anything but what is now written policy. Lowest common denominator situation.
Basically upper management doesn’t trust boots on the ground so they make broad sweeping rules that they strictly enforce.
I’m no longer allowed to use a work vehicle when running errands and also stop by a drive through even though that exact process was described as “managers discretion” in the policy/procedure.
… Because one person elsewhere got rear-ended in a drive through, all 250+ branches of my company can no longer allow it’s delivery drivers to pick up food on the way back to branch.
I’m assuming the person in the original post has a policy in place that is exactly saying don’t do what he did
Of course it’s Gibson. Dogshit company with over-priced instruments pissed that better alternatives exist so they desperately try to ride on nostalgia and bullshit.
Why would you even have the position of Manager then?
God DAMN that’s a great question
Joe should see a lawyer about a wrongful termination lawsuit.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (pdf) brought to law in 1996 shields most liability for people donating food exactly like he did.
This may have been a knee-jerk reaction from the employer incorrectly assuming they could be liable if someone got sick. Though its also possible they’ve been looking for a reason to dismiss a long time employee to replace him with a cheaper one. Corporate ownership makes me leans towards the latter.
Liability if the food is bad. He was fired because the company perceives it as theft. The act does not cover that.
Same reason grocery stores toss perfectly good food in locked dumpsters in lieu of donating it.
The only chain place with fresh food that donates their extra at the end of the day is Panera.
And this is exactly why by law Italian supermarkets have to donate anything approaching its sell-by date.
Oh fuck. We need that law in the states.
They’ll get there. The US is still working through the Italian playbook. They’re up to the 1930s.
Fuck, too accurate.
On the surface it seems like you’re being encouraging. Too bad i’ve skimmed a history book at least once in my life.
😭
Maybe… I guess Id rather see a law that makes it illegal to stop someone from gathering or donating discarded food. I dont want a restaurant or grocery store to have to fuck around with record keeping and shit. I just want them to have to allow someone to do the right thing if it’s not going to be them doing the right thing.
Interesting, here in the UK they sell it at a discount, which greatly helps us poorer people afford food.
Ironically if it’s all donated to food banks instead, I’d never see it and would struggle more - I may be poor but I can afford food so I don’t want to take away from what others might need more than me.
The whole system is sadly broken anyway, so much food, yet so many hungry :-(
I just recently became a department manager at a grocery store.
For us, any product close to expiry has three options. Reduce price by half, put product on FlashFood (an app for connecting grocers and shoppers to sell product at steep discounts), or freeze product at or before expiration date and donate to the food bank. Depending on the product, some can also be reused as an ingredient for the meals section. The goal is zero food waste for the whole corporation by 2030. The only exception to that I guess would be damaged product (punctured packaging, bad seal, etc).
There’s a place near me that sells under-selling, damaged package, and past-sell-by-date processed food for a super steep discount. It’s priced like being in the 90s or early 00s. They buy it from grocery store distributors who collect items that are “returned” to them by the store, and it’s run by Amish which don’t seem bound by quite the same regulations…? Not entirely sure how they are allowed to do that, though there’s another place in the opposite direction that isn’t Amish and does the same thing, so maybe it’s just allowed here.
Since most packaged food is still good well beyond the sell-by date, this means I can buy dry goods, shelf-stable microwave meals, and condiment sauces, and fill my car trunk/boot for about $100. It’s pretty out of the way, so I only make it there every few months, but I stock up heavily when I go. I’d probably have needed food assistance or just starved if I hadn’t found that place. (I prefer not to use it since my understanding is that it’s not a forever benefit even if you need it forever, and circumstances may warrant use later)
Have to be super careful about what sorts of things you buy, some of it goes stale or separates a lot faster than other things, but it’s all still edible, and if I get stuff that’s not tasty to me, my chickens eat it and poop out eggs, so it’s not really a loss.
I worked in a grocery store that had a little pizza making section. End of the day they’d throw out a lot of pizza. Management absolutely did not want employees to grab some at the end of the day.
Well, I was friends with the guy who worked there so he’d “throw it out” into my possession. I had a lot of free pizza back then.
Nowadays there’s an app “too good to go” where you can get cheap food at the end of the day from places. Not as good as free, but like four slices of pizza for $5 isn’t bad.
is that app your chain specific or location because i love the idea
So far as I know it’s available in a bunch of regions: https://www.toogoodtogo.com/en-us
thank you so much! i am going to share this with the rest of the faculty, this is great.
We’re the only super power that refuses to agree that food and water are a human right.
“Hey! Are you bootlegging that AIR? You gotta pay for that!”
Oh and I forgot we are the only ones that think medical care and housing is pay to play as well.
They used to dump them in unlocked dumpsters but people figured that out and started pilfering the dumpsters. My dad, not poor at all but quite frugal/cheap, somehow heard about this and started taking me as a kid to go dumpster diving with him. It was crazy the amount of food we brought home for those couple years before places started locking the dumpsters. And there were a lot of people driving up and going through them just like us.
There was an entire documentary about people dumpster diving at grocery stores for free food.
That documentary is called: Dive! Living Off America’s Waste.
Here’s a trailer for it.
And here’s the full documentary on YouTube.
Crazy to me that it was filmed in 2010. My experience dumpster diving was as a kid in the 80s in Phoenix and as I mentioned, the stores started locking things up and so it stopped. Or so I thought… it seems in many areas it was and maybe still is occurring. Perhaps locking dumpsters is too much of a hassle for some places. Anyway, thanks for sharing!
I didn’t really consider the reason the company gave for the dismissal. Though it occurs to me now that any incident where someone loses their job due to donating food nearing expiry could be plausibly written up as thievery by the company doing the firing.
Which is a nuance that might be worth chatting to a lawyer about.
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This is very much wrong, and something I’ve always disagreed with.
The reasoning behind it, is ‘conflict of interest’ (I’m just passing on the reason I was told when I worked for 7-11). The employees in the store look at a ‘product forcast’, decide how many cookies to make (heat up some pre-made dough) and package for sale. If they are permitted to keep or donate expiring product: they may intentionally make more than needed, ensuring they get free stuff. This goes for all of 7-11s ‘made in house’ (assembled as best, usually just re-heated. Fried Chicken was the closest to ‘fresh’ they sell) products. Cookies, sandwiches, hot food, etc.
I get that viewpoint; but I think they should punish abuse of the system, not outright prohibit saving perfectly good food, if nearly expiring/expired, for good causes like the needy/homeless.
It’s not too hard to look at stores and see that there’s a consistent overproduction. Instead they punish people.
Yeah; the current system is a bit of an overreaction. Some people abuse and tracking it is work; so everyone gets punished and food gets wasted entirely instead. Stupid.
At my gas station we were required to put out a certain amount of hot dogs and hothold items but not allowed to eat it even after it’s expiration (4 hours) unless we paid for it
The guys at my local 7-11 treat my nephew like their little brother and will give him a bunch of extra food if he goes there towards the evening. “Here take an extra hot dog” kind of thing.
Nice :)
Some of the managers are very nice and are happy to bend obviously stupid rules, others have a massive stick jammed deeep up inside their rectum…
The manager that hired me, re-wrote my employment contract and forged my signature on the new one, to put me as part-time instead of full time. Didn’t find out until 3mo later when I asked about my benefits package to the manager that replaced her and got confused looks/responses.
I even see that as bs. My friend worked for BK back in the 80’s when they were still decent and tacitly the manager would stop over making of food but he erred on the side of over and they took stuff home and it was a nice little perk. Now granted if its abused to the point they are like reselling the stuff then yeah you gotta nail them. It just blows me away how bad minimum wage jobs have gotten and how many regular jobs have been pushed closer and closer to min wage.
Everyone should call the number! The prompts to get you to a human are 2, 1. I just spoke with Stacy, and she literally wrote down my comment. Like with a pen and paper.
Casey’s is actually one of the few ethical petrol stations and will actually listen to customer feedback.
Casey’s is actually one of the few ethical petrol stations
The very fact we’re in this situation kinda tells me otherwise.
Corporate≠regional management.
I don’t know. I’ve been dealing with ai chat bots more than should be reasonable. It was nice to talk to a human.
Our society will not improve until we punish this type of disgusting behavior. The people responsible for firing others for things like this must be held accountable.
hello - -
my name is joe - -
i have a wife - a dog
and a fam-il-ee
and i work - -
in a cookie factory
one day - - -
my boss came up to me he said
hey joe are ya busy i said no
he said do this - -
so i did - - -There is too much of this in the world, no big corporation is getting hurt by them donating food they just want to keep from helping people and making the world a better place who cares if they bring them cookies they were going to lose money in anyways at least they actually got used!
Here, use a few of these: …,
Must’ve breach some stupid must-throw rule all these corpos like.
Big chains do stuff like that. They usually got on trouble once, or got some employees trying to game the system. Stuff with a damaged package can be taken by workers? There’s always one guy that ‘accidentally’ drops the good stuff and then takes it home, and does that every day. Expired stuff can be taken home? Some things somehow end up in the back and are forgotten until one day over expiration. And then there are the idiots that find some stuff weeks expired, take it home, and then sue the company for giving them bad stuff. Usually management finds that it’s easier to just outright outlaw taking things home instead of dealing with a few idiots, and that ruins it for all other people handling in good faith.
I’m not accusing you of making excuses for them, because all you’re giving is a reason, and you’re right. And at first it does feel like an excuse. But “management finds that it’s easier” deserves more of our focus and pressure. If they’re big enough that it’s hard to manage basic employee rules/discipline on the ground, they’re probably also big enough to be pocketing loads of profit. It’s reasonable to expect that they’d to allocate some of those spoils to finding better solutions than “throw all the food away.” For instance, if you pay people what their work is worth, they’re less likely to risk termination by taking your old cookies.
And most people would think it’s a huge waste of trashing stuff that’s still usable, but companies don’t care unless forced by regulations. Hell, a bunch of companies go out of their way to make stuff unusable.
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