Imagine finding out that your manager was lying to corporate. Would you rat them out, or would you use this knowledge to your advantage?

In this story, one fast food employee was able to make a lot of extra money after discovering his manager had been literally hiding something from the employees and corporate.

Let’s read all the details.

I stole over $20,000 in a very creative way in the 90’s

I worked at a fast food chain in the 90’s when I was in high school.

When I worked there they were in the process of phasing out denominational gift certificates. ($5, $10 & $25)

The way is worked was if you spent more than half of the certificate they gave you the cash back. So if you ordered $5.50 worth of food and gave them one of the $10 gift cards, they gave you the $4.50 back in cash.

My manager was in charge of destroying all the existing certificates as we transitioned to the more traditional credit card looking gift cards.

The manager had been lying.

So my manager said he shredded the certificates like he was supposed to, but one night when I was closing I found two boxes of the gift cards tucked deep in the dry storage room.

They were FILLED with the certificates that were supposed to be shredded.

So, I scooped them up, brought them out to the dumpster in trash bags and threw them away.

After we closed, I came back and recovered the back, and brought the certificates home.

The gift certificates REALLY added up!

I counted them.

There were 1,000 $25, 1,000 $10, and 500 $5 certificates. None of them had expiration dates.

Total haul was $40K in fast food certificates.

My manager never said a word, he couldn’t. He had reported them destroyed weeks earlier.

He knew how to make the most of these certificates!

Over the next three years my girlfriend and I toured every location in our state, and the next 4 states ordering food, and getting the change.

We never kept track on a spreadsheet or anything, but we got good at knowing what menu items were just about half.

After the first year, we started saving the change in a shoe box, and let it build up.

This was their best hack for getting cash back.

I bought my first car for $7,800 cash from the change.

And for some reason A kiddie cone was $1.05, if you gave them a $5 cert they gave you $3.95 back.

We threw away a lot of kiddie cones.

This employee made a lot of extra money and kind of got revenge on the manager.

Let’s see what Reddit thinks of this story.

This person did some math.

This person thinks OP did a really bad thing.

Another person thinks all employees steal gift certificates.

It would be harder to pull this off today.

This was a time consuming task.

The manager was probably really upset.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.