Getting a new boss can be a make-or-break experience. Sometimes, they’re a breath of fresh air that brings welcome change to the workplace. But sometimes, like this Reddit user’s new boss, they’re not only dehumanizing, they’re introducing sweeping changes that just don’t make sense.
The restaurant announced that if they did not pay employees who ate the leftovers, they would be fired.
Food waste is a fact of life in restaurants, eateries, convenience stores and anywhere that prepares and sells food, but the scale of it is truly staggering.
The U.S. foodservice industry wastes up to 33 billion pounds of food each year, which literally equates to billions of meals.
So when you think about hungry people around the world and economically struggling people here in the United States, it makes sense to think that food that would otherwise be thrown away would be better used to feed those people, right?
That’s not the case for most restaurants, but after years of taking a smarter approach, this Reddit user’s workplace is now one of them.
Since the management changed, the bosses have become stricter on everything, including throwing food in the trash, without exception, unless employees pay for it.
Store managers posted policies for a long list of food items that require payment, including stale baked goods, stating that three violations will result in a fine.
“I’ll be honest, I liked my work environment,” the worker wrote in the post, “but I was transferred to a different district and my district manager was changed,” and then, overnight, everything changed.
It started with a terse notice placed next to the time clock stating in capital letters the new food policy: “Any food of any kind should not be taken away,” the notice shouted at the beginning.
It also read in capital letters: “No food of any kind will be taken away, even if it is waste, unless you pay for it. If you eat it, you must pay for it.”
The list of foods that must be paid for includes foods that can no longer even be sold.
The new district manager provided a list of all the foods employees were prohibited from eating, some of which were downright ridiculous.
This includes perishable foods like sub sandwiches and salads, pizza slices, and even whole pizzas. Unless the employee has money to pay for the whole pizza that they throw in the trash, the whole pizza goes in the trash.
That’s ridiculous.
The policy will likely be even tougher on baked goods like doughnuts, cookies, and muffins, which store managers say must be paid for whether they’re “new” or “old and stale” — meaning they can’t be sold, meaning employees have to pay for stale food that can’t be sold.
“I understand that what is written here is pretty much industry standard at this point, but she really does understand that we are not people,” the employee wrote in the post. Indeed, making people pay for rotten baked goods would certainly give that impression.
This is standard practice in corporate-run restaurants, which are required to throw out any wasted food, no exceptions.
Corporate restaurants have a lot of absurd rules — just ask anyone who’s worked there — but perhaps the most absurd are the food waste procedures.
This often comes down to a liability issue: if a restaurant donates food to a homeless shelter or something, or gives it to its employees, the restaurant could be held liable if the food is bad and someone gets sick.
But that’s not actually true: The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act protects parties who “in good faith” donate food from liability in these cases, though some experts say it’s unclear how the law applies to employees.
However, we’re not talking about food left in the fridge going bad. We’re talking about cooked food that just wasn’t sold. For example, if a pizza was sold one minute before the restaurant closed, it would probably still be edible one minute later when an employee wanted to take it home. What’s the problem?
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A lot of restaurants worry that if they let their employees eat leftovers, they’ll start intentionally ordering the wrong food to take them away, but this is basically saying that if you treat your employees like people, they’ll take advantage of you. Great business move. Hats off to you.
But even if that were true, in a country with record levels of poverty and homelessness, where the world is plagued by food shortages, and where the food industry throws around 75 billion meals in the trash every year, no one can see how throwing an entire pizza in the trash solves any of those problems.
Feed your employees stale donuts, it’s not that serious.
John Sandholm is a news and entertainment writer covering pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
