Restaurant Makes It A Fireable Offense To Eat Leftover Food Being Thrown In The Garbage Unless Workers Pay For It First
What exactly is the point of making employees pay for food that's going to be thrown in the trash?
AndreyPopov / Getty Images / Canva Pro Getting a new boss can be a make-or-break experience. Sometimes, they're a breath of fresh air that brings about welcome change to a workplace. And then sometimes they're like this Redditor's new boss and bring in sweeping changes that are not only dehumanizing but don't even make any sense.
The eatery announced it would fire workers for eating leftovers unless they paid.
Food waste is just a part of the game in restaurants, eateries, convenience stores — anywhere food is prepared and sold. But the scale of the waste is truly astonishing.
The American food service industry wastes up to 33 billion pounds of food every year, which equates to literally billions of meals.
So it stands to reason that with all the starving people in the world and all the financially struggling people right here in America, you might as well let people eat that food you're just going to throw away, right?
Not at most eateries, and after a long time of having a more sensible approach, this Redditor's workplace has now become one of them.
After a managerial change, their boss is now cracking the whip on all sorts of things, including throwing food in the garbage without exception unless employees pay for it.
The boss posted a three-strike penalty policy for a long list of food items that now have to be paid for, including stale baked goods.
"I honestly liked my work environment up until now," the worker wrote in their post. "We got switched to a different district, so now we have a different district manager." And overnight, everything changed.
It started with a tersely worded notice by the time clock, stating with all-caps the new food policy. "ABSOLUTELY NO taking of ANY kind of food HOME," the notice bellowed in its opening line.
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It also stated in all caps, "We do not take any type of food home unless it's paid for, even if it is waste. If you're eating it, IT NEEDS TO BE PAID FOR."
The list of foods that must be paid for includes food that cannot even be sold any longer.
The new district manager provided a list of all the food items that are now forbidden for employees to eat, and several of the items are flat-out ridiculous.
It includes perishables like sub sandwiches and salads, along with pizza slices and even entire pizzas. Whole pizzas go into the garbage unless the employees have money to pay for the entire pizza that is going into the garbage.
It is ludicrous.
Perhaps even more so are the baked goods included in the policy, like donuts, cookies, and muffins, which the manager says must be paid for whether they are "new" or "staled-out old." So, unsellable — employees are required to pay for unsellable, stale food.
"I get that everything on here is pretty much industry standard at this point, but she really gets the point across that we are not people to her," the worker wrote in their post. Yeah, making people pay for rotten baked goods would certainly give that impression.
This is standard practice in corporate-run eateries — wasted food is required to be thrown out, with no exceptions.
Corporate restaurants have many absurd rules — ask anyone who's worked in one. But their food waste procedures are perhaps the most ridiculous.
Often this is chalked up to liability issues. If the restaurant were to donate the food, say to a homeless shelter, or give it to employees, they may be held liable if it were bad and made someone sick.
That's actually not true though — the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act protects parties who donate food "in good faith" from liability in these cases. That said, some experts say the law is not clear about how this applies to employees.
Still, we're not talking about food sitting back in the refrigerator going off. We're talking about food prepared that simply didn't sell. If the pizza, for instance, was sellable one minute before the restaurant closed, it's presumably still good one minute after it's closed when a worker wants to take it home. What is the problem?
Many restaurants cite concerns that if they let employees eat leftovers, they will begin purposefully misordering food items with the intent of taking them, which is basically saying that if you treat employees like human beings, they will take advantage of you. Great management skills, guys. Hats off.
Even if that were true, though, how exactly does throwing entire pizzas into the trash solve these problems — in a country with record poverty and homelessness, a world wracked by food shortages, and an industry throwing some 75 billion meals in the garbage every year — is anyone's guess.
Let your employees eat the stale donuts, for God's sake. It's not that serious.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.