Warehouse rules can get out of hand, but few things frustrate a team more than taking away a small perk they’ve enjoyed for years.

So, what would you do if your manager suddenly banned employees from eating broken chip bags that were otherwise headed for the trash? Would you just go on with your job? Or would you help come up with a clever workaround that makes your point loud and clear?

In the following story, one group of warehouse workers band together to teach upper management a lesson. Here’s how it all went down.

A story about chips

A long time ago, I worked weekends in a warehouse that received chips in bulk (think like one truck shows up all one flavor), where workers loaded up other trucks with the orders going to individual stores.

So think of pallets of chips in boxes stacked 30 feet up and trucks in docks being loaded up with a mix of chips of all flavors going out to convenience stores and grocery stores.

Our job as “pickers” is to push around a large cart and pick boxes of chips of all flavours as we go around the warehouse.

Then we load out order into the truck and go to the next order and so on.

They were allowed to eat damaged bags.

When we dropped a box and a bag burst open, well, we would eat it.

There would always be at least a couple of open bags we could munch on at the warehouse.

I only worked weekends. During the week, a lot of things would happen and I would only find out about changes the next weekend.

One weekend, I showed up, and we were no longer allowed to eat chips!!!

Apparently, a new manager was hired, and he was on a power trip and told the guys, “The next person I see eating our chips will be fired for theft of company property.”

Frustrated, the crew devised a plan.

This seemed a little ridiculous, as they would also make us compact hundreds of cases of chips when they were too close to their expiry date (like less than 6 weeks).

There was a lot of waste, so for them to get on our case for eating a measly bag of chips was a little infuriating.

Anyway, I don’t need to tell you that the guys were mad about this, and morale was low that weekend.

Next weekend, I come back in. The guys let me know that the manager is in a super bad mood.

The workers devised a plan to get back at the manager.

They would buy chips from our main competitor brand and eat the competitor’s brand of chips as they worked.

The plan worked like a charm.

They argued to management that since it was from another brand, they could not get in trouble for theft, as it was 100% certain the chips had been purchased with their own money.

Now, the warehouse management was appalled that we were all munching on the competition’s goods, but there was nothing they could do about it.

It took a few weeks for this situation to get resolved but the way they “fixed it” in the end is that the managers would put a sticker on some bags for us to eat.

In the end, we would be allowed to munch on the company products once the bags had been “approved” to be eaten by management. So then it was not considered theft anymore, and we were able to resume eating from the company stock.

Wow! Talk about a silly policy!

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit have to say about it.

This is a great question.

Too funny!

A store like this sounds amazing.

This sounds like a win-win.

What a petty policy!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.