Imagine working in a grocery store and training a new employee how to place orders. If you realized there was a big mistake, would you assume it was the new employee, or would you do some digging to find out for sure?

In this story, one employee is in that exact situation, and he decides to look at the order to find out what happened because clearly someone really messed up.

Let’s see what he discovered.

You would think they would have called.

Now it’s time for something completely different.

In the 90’s I worked for a very large grocery store chain. Our company owned a commercial bakery, that made store branded bread, chips, crackers and some cookies.

The whole division(most of the state) gets orders from this bakery, from 3 to 5 days a week.

My store is one of the smaller stores in the division, we get an order 3 times a week, and usually get between 100-150 “pieces.” A piece is what you get if your order “one” of something and it can be completely different from one item to the next; a 24-pack case of canned vegetables, or a single bag of dog food.

This could be confusing.

When I was trained to write orders, the shelf tags had a notation “PK#” that told us how many of that item would ship to us per piece. So if I need 12 boxes to fill the shelf, and the tag says PK6, then I’m ordering two pieces today.

I trained a friend to write orders around 1996, he was given the responsibility to order from the bakery.

After his first solo order, we got a truck with 480 pieces.

Normally the truck makes several stops at several other stores along the route, but this one was all ours. The truck driver told us that the bakery put on an extra shift, just for this order!

OP needed to know how this happened.

Somehow we got 300 cases(pk24) of tortilla chips. 100 each of 3 kinds. They take up 17 pallets, and he’s allowed 1 for back-stock.

My coworker would be in later that evening, but I needed to see if he actually ordered this or what actually happened.

I go to the manager’s office, where the computer is (90’s technology was wonderful) to lookup the outgoing order.

After about half an hour of searching…

It turns out, it wasn’t the new coworker who messed up.

[Manager] What are you doing up here?

[Me] I’m looking at the bakery order that went out yesterday. Do you know who ID 98765 is? or why they re-opened that order before it transmitted?

[Manager] Yeah, that was me. I got a special order for tortilla chips, I had to add it on. They come in?

[Me] (big sigh of relief) Yeah they came in, I was worried (coworker) made a mistake. The bakery had to put on a third shift for that.

The manager realized his mistake.

[Manager] For 3 cases of chips?

Me You … you ordered 300. Not three

Minutes of silence pass as we both look at the computer screen. It clearly shows his ID number re-opened the order, added 100 pieces to each of three UPC codes, closed and transmitted the order.

At least customers got a good deal.

[Manager] You’d think they’d call and confirm an order like that before they pay a an entire shift of overtime for a single order…

For the next month, Store brand tortilla chips were 33¢ a bag.

At least the proof was there, and the manager had to own up to the mistake. I’m relieved for the new coworker that it was the manager who messed up.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s a story about a guy in the Navy who made a similar mistake.

A kitchen manager shares a story about ordering too much.

A restaurant manager also messed up an order.

Here’s another story about a manager accidentally ordering way too much.

Managers should not be allowed to place orders unless they are trained to place orders.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.