In the restaurant industry, if food is expired, you’re out a lot of money. What would you do if your boss told you to relabel the food so that it had a new, later expiration date? Would you do it?

In today’s story, one employee was used to relabeling food, but not everyone thought this was a good idea. In the end, will the company choose to relabel the food or throw it out?

Let’s read all the details.

Bye bye money!

I worked at a what was a recently bankrupt large restaurant that was very strict with throwing things out if they were “out of date.” (Their self-imposed self life was ridiculous low.) This matters for later.

Funny enough, the managers “knew” better/they were worried about food cost, so they would have us relabel for an extra day or two.

At one point, a temporary corporate DM took over duties for our location and ended up watching me change dates to keep things a bit longer.

There’s a new rule.

The next day, we had a “random” pre-shift meeting where they brought up that they had noticed people relabeling product.

They stressed that this was no longer acceptable.

Bye bye expired food.

Cue malicious compliance: I had no problems following their rule.

The same night at closing time, I went through every single thing I could find and got rid of it.

Walk-in, freezer, dry storage, the whole line… anything that was labeled, and absolutely everything that wasn’t labeled.

Easily threw out 3k worth of product.

Another meeting…

Of course, the next day, they went ape crazy about it.

They called another pre-shift meeting.

This time, just mostly going off on how much stuff was thrown away.

Back to the old rule.

Once they were done ranting, without fixing the problem at all, I waited for the dinner rush to be over and went to the office to talk to them about it.

Things got a little heated, but they eventually decided to go back to how things were before.

Anyway, I’m happy they died out. They weren’t worth the price, and even the reason the business started was kinda messed up.

I mean, what is the real expiration date? Obviously, you shouldn’t sell expired products, but if the products haven’t expired, maybe they could be relabeled and marked down for a quick sale. That would be more honest but would mean they’d lose less money.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person thinks it’s best to throw out expired food.

Another person would keep the food.

Here’s the real problem…

Different labels have different meanings.

Seriously, this is a weird thing to be upset about.

I’m glad that restaurant went out of business.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.