One Workplace Policy Suddenly Put Food Waste Under The Spotlight, And An Employee Started Questioning What Management Was Really Doing With It
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Distrust can create a lot more work than simply treating employees like adults.
One arena manager is told every scrap of unsold food must be boxed up and delivered downstairs for inspection.
Instead of arguing, he follows the vague order perfectly and starts sending the warehouse some truly unpleasant leftovers.
See how management’s anti-theft policy eventually became everyone else’s garbage problem.
Don’t assume I am a crook
This happened a few years back, when I was between jobs, a mini-recession was underway, and I wanted a who-cares job in a high-energy environment.
I ended up managing a food stand at the local NHL hockey arena. In the stand there was myself (Stand Lead), one head cashier, a cook, a runner, and a number of cashiers.
This company started from the position that all their employees were crooks – sorry to be so blunt, but that was their reality.
It was not an unfounded position – refilling beer cups and pocketing the cash from the sale was not a rare practice. I had two of my cashiers fired after secret shoppers caught them.
If you’re going to do something shady, you have to know how to do it.
The trick was to do this with non-inventory items.
At the start and end of a night I counted everything: Beer cups, the cardboard triangles on which pizza was served, popcorn bags, bags of potato chips, etc.
Bulk items could not be counted: Popcorn, draft beer, nacho chips, etc.
At the end of the night we garbaged the bulk items that cannot be carried over to the next night: Cooked hot dogs, pizza sliced, popcorn, etc.
Not everything was thrown away.
We may have wolfed down a few items. “We’re closed, I’m going to toss these three leftover slices in the bin, anyone want one?”
I recorded the waste (three slices), but they may not have all made it into the garbage.
Apparently some suit envisioned that stands might loading up with extra food from the delivery folks, or cooking extra hot dogs.
Manglement got their panties in a twist about us eating the garbage, and sent a memo that all waste was to be boxed up and carried down to the warehouse.
It was easy enough to comply.
So we did as told.
After counting the waste, into the box went a random assortment of pizza slices, hot dogs, and popcorn.
It wasn’t put in neatly. There was always lots of popcorn.
Manglement probably didn’t care about the popcorn, but the directive was vague so they got it anyway.
The box was stuffed with popcorn.
If the warehouse ever did anything with what was in that box, it would be a fermenting fly-infested mess by the time they got around to opening the boxes.
OP finally had the opportunity to ask what happens to boxes of food waste.
At the after-work beer party the directive was discussed, none of the stand leads liked the assumptions made regarding our integrity, and they adopted the practice.
A month or two later I had reason to chat with the warehouse on another topic, and I asked them what they did with all the food waste that was brought down.
Answer: We toss it right into the dumpster, we’re not digging through that mess.
“You never go in and count anything?”
Now, nobody is complying with management.
Nah, the suits tried to make us, but we refused, we already have full time jobs and they wouldn’t hire anyone whose job description was to dig through garbage. It’s just the suits trying to intimidate you stand leads.
I resumed binning my waste, and not lugging anything down to the warehouse.
Nobody noticed.
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I passed the word.
Neither we, nor the warehouse, told management. The empty suits never noticed.
It’s silly for management to make a rule that is too annoying and time consuming to follow.
Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.
Workers win when they work together.
Here’s a better idea for the food waste than the trash.
A 7-eleven employee weighs in.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a longtime bank customer who walked away after the teller gave them a hard time.
This person wants to know more about the NHL team.
The stand leads dutifully hauled boxes of leftover pizza, hot dogs, and popcorn downstairs, only to learn the warehouse immediately threw everything away.
Once OP discovered nobody was actually inspecting the waste, the stands quietly returned to using their own trash bins and management never noticed.
They built an anti-theft system so effective that even management forgot it existed.
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