Have you ever had a super annoying task at work that is only made worse by the bad habits of your coworkers? Would you eventually buckle down and do the task correctly, or would you find a way to get it done without anyone knowing the truth about how you really handled it?

This guy shares a funny grocery store story about how to organized the candy.

Check out what happened!

Threw away over $1000 worth of candy and got a raise

In the early 1990s when I was in my 20s I worked at a grocery store in the Midwest whose name rhymes with herbs that was owned by the chain Kroger.

After working days for about six months I was eventually move to working the 11 to 7 or 10 to 6 overnight shifts and found that I really preferred them both for the clientele and for the different pace and not having to deal directly with the clueless general manager.

This is where things get weird…

One of the duties of the lone overnight checker was to restock all of the candy and snacks at the multiple checkout lanes.

The candy was stored in the stairwell giving the only access to the second floor office near the front of the store (which was an obvious fire hazard).

Just picture ~10 opened cardboard boxes stacked along a not particularly wide stairwell and you could imagine how messed up the whole thing was.

He explains how things work usually…

A lady who worked in the morning who inventoried the candy remaining on the shelf was a different person than the afternoon lady whose job it was to occasionally(read never) inventory remaining candy in the stairwell.

Then, daytime checkers who were supposed to fill the lulls between customers by cleaning their check stations and restocking candy would just grab whatever was handy at the bottom of the stairs, including opening brand new packages to take out the individual sale packages inside to top up their aisles displays meaning that over time those ~10 large cardboard boxes of candy each had a bunch of partial boxes and loose pieces inside of just random candy with no organization.

He knew what he had to do!

Because I worked as the overnight checker I was constantly getting notes attached to my time card from the general manager (who only had his job because he was golf buddies with the district manager and had never worked in a grocery store before three years before that) reminding me to sort out the mess by stocking the candy.

One of the banes of my existence was the ordering lady in the morning ordering a bunch of Cherry Nibs. Apparently it was part of a discount deal to buy a bunch of them yet we barely sold any of them.

There were unopened and partial boxes of them in every one of the larger boxes that held candy as well as the mad assortment of other candy.

He wasn’t letting this go!

Finally after about a dozen notes attached to my time card over the course of a month I decided to act.

One night I pulled all the boxes down off of the stairs and told the night manager that I was going to sort it all out for good and he said fine.

He was actually a cool guy who let me get work done and ran a very relaxed yet efficient shift.

I sorted all the candy into chocolate, gum, suckers, basically by category labeled about six of the boxes, put all the stuff back in their proper boxes, and then put all the rest of the candy in a cart along with the trash that it was my job to take out from the registers at night.

UH OH!

I then proceeded to throw what I can only estimate was $1000 or more worth of candy, including 90% of those damn Nibs, into the trash compactor in the back of the store with all of the trash on top of it so the next person who used it wouldn’t notice a bunch of crushed candy and report me.

The next night when I clocked in I was pleasantly surprised to find that instead of being fired there was a note on my time card letting me know good job, and that I would be getting a $.25 an hour raise starting on my next paycheck.

Let it be known that nothing containing chocolate went into the trash as I am not a heathen!

YIKES! That’s a lot of money!

I’m surprised nobody realized he threw away a bunch of candy!

Let’s find out what people on Reddit commented under this story.

This user loves this guy!

This user shares the perfect response if anyone had noticed the trashed candy!

This user knows that good people exist as well.

This user knows the manager was done with their job!

This user wants to know why this guy threw out the other candy.

He got the job done!

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