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Comment on 10+ year manager named Joe was apparently fired for bringing cookies to be thrown away before their sell by date to a food pantry in my town

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rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

The general corporate answer is that the misappropriation of waste is theft. They’ll try to propose that Joe might hide boxes of cookies to take them, causing disproportionate waste. Giving them to the pantry instead of keeping them for himself is immaterial to their rules.

Realistically, some companies move near-out-of-date products to the sale rack and then offer them up to pantries after they pass their best-by date. They should easily be able to look at waste and sales here and make a judgment call. I’m betting someone local had a beef with Joe, didn’t get their preferred day off, and turned him in.

Handled correctly, corporate would have donated a shit ton to the food pantry, taken a tax break, improved the community and told Joe to cut it out if they really cared.

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WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Didn’t Eskimos throw sociopaths off cliffs?

Why doesn’t the conversation end there?

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- TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Begging your pardon, but Eskimo is considered pejorative. The people in question called themselves Inuit.
  
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  - PhoenixDog@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not considered.
    
    Is.
    
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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  As far as I’m aware of, no.
  
  and because capitalism
  
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  - Test_Tickles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    You think they would if we asked nicely.
    
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    rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It could happen, but think of the poor cliffs, they stood for eons just to witness such violence and be unable to partake in it themselves.
    
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- HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Not too many cliffs were they’re from. Now ice floes OTOH, lots. And it was the elderly. And rarely.
  
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  - rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    And rarely.
    
    that’s because they didn’t have my relatives :), I pine for the ice floes
    
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Sunsofold@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
If you don’t trust someone to appropriately handle waste, you don’t trust them enough to be a manager.

Giving them to the pantry instead of keeping them for himself is immaterial to their rules.

This is prime executive laziness. In this case, that should warrant an investigation by upper management. If the regional director fired an otherwise productive manager for what really would amount to ‘not getting a receipt for tax purposes,’ one has to question whether they’ve been promoted beyond their capabilities. Rules are for people who aren’t trusted to apply critical thinking to their job, i.e. relatively new minimum wage workers. Managers are supposed to be people with enough education, experience, and established trust to make decisions on behalf of the company. If they aren’t trusted, they shouldn’t have been made a manager.

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  If you don’t trust someone to appropriately handle waste
  
  They trusted him for 10 years, presumably until someone turned him in.
  
  This is prime executive laziness. … not getting a receipt for tax purposes,
  
  What if they were against giving the food away? what if their worry is that someone would hide the stuff till it expires to give more away. It’s not a very neighborly line of thinking, but it’s also not unreasonable.
  
  . Managers are supposed to be people with enough education, experience, and established trust to make decisions on behalf of the company.
  
  No way, in corporate land, the managers are there to enforce the rules. They’re there to order the food, make sure the staff comes in, make sure the food gets thrown away if that’s policy. Most managers don’t get the discretion to break protocol when they feel like it.
  
  If they aren’t trusted, they shouldn’t have been made a manager. Well they apparently solved that problem
  
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  - Sunsofold@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    What if they were against giving the food away?
    
    Then they’re malevolent, and thus unqualified for their position. If someone are faced with the choice between giving something away in a way that can benefit them, and just setting the thing on fire purely to prevent someone else possibly benefitting, and they choose the latter, they are unqualified for any executive position. Even if one assigns no value to the potential of helping others, they are actively choosing to lose out on almost certain benefits (through tax benefits, PR, reduction of thefts of necessity, which are appreciably likely to come from their store’s saleable stock rather than their waste) to prevent possible, but improbable, losses. That is actively choosing a worse outcome for the company they are ostensibly working to serve. Failure.
    
    what if their worry is that someone would hide the stuff till it expires to give more away.
    
    Then either:
    A) The person is committing malfeasance and can be audited, as all managers should be anyway, and fired for actual harm, (which is still unlikely to cause enough damages to actually be a threat to the company, because if it caused an appreciable dip in profits, they’d fire them for incompetence without even needing a detailed audit)
    or B) they can demonstrate to the management they are doing something that actually works out in the favor of the company, and the halfwits would be firing someone who found a way to turn trash into money.
    
    It is idiotic mismanagement to throw away someone with years of experience because they might do something that most people wouldn’t think of. Even an unpaid intern has enough access such that they might choose to misappropriate something of value. If you fire everyone who might take advantage of their access for misappropriation, there will be no employees, just a building stripped even of its copper wiring because you couldn’t trust a security guard to have keys.
    
    Most managers don’t get the discretion to break protocol when they feel like it.
    
    This is a statement of current failure, not a reason not to improve. I’m saying something like ‘It’s a bad idea to cut your hands with a knife,’ and your response is something like, ‘But in all the kitchens I’ve worked in, people cut themselves all the time.’ Something bad doesn’t become good just because it’s common. If a job can be accomplished just blindly following a list of prescribed rules and procedures, that’s a minimum wage job or a job in need of automation, not an executive position for a human.
    
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    rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Don’t go to work in a corporate enterprise :) You’ll end up sorely disappointed in most places.
    
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chiliedogg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
When I was in retail, we were required to destroy anything we threw away.

If we had a warranty issue on a product, the manufacturer would usually just ship us a new one because it was cheaper than a repair, and we’d have to provide proof of destruction. My favorite was for kayaks. We had to mail back a portion of the body at least 1 square foot in area that included the serial number stamp.

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yeah, that’s just how waste works.
  
  Big Box retail, we used to have to ship most everything non-salable back to depot. The trucks would unload 10 pallets and load one back up every couple weeks. The depo would trash the stuff with proof and get the credits from the manufacturer.
  
  I worked in fast food too, some of the managers would allow some waste to be taken, but it would have been their asses if the DM’s caught wind. Slippery slope from accidentally cooking too much chicken to making enough to feed your family dinner. Had one manager once who traded food with Little Caesers and we all had pizza that night, it was awesome.
  
  We had this substitute manager once, she was from a busy store. They always sent the chicken guy home at 7 to save cash and had the back line cook throw down another tray if things got low. Before they sent the chicken guy home, she had him put down two trays. That’s 8 chickens worth of parts. On a busy night, we might maybe sell a half a tray between 7 and close.
  
  hey, Rumba, can you tray up the chicken and finish cleaning if I send C home? Yeah sure. (C was always clean AF) I go back there and there were 2 fryers full. Ohhh SHIT.
  
  End of the night we sold maybe half a tray. She came back all worried. Hey, we have kinda WAY too much chicken, I’ll be here for a couple more days, any chance you can help me spread the waste out between now and Friday?
  
  I got to take home a trashbag with 36 pieces. And just made almost exactly what we’d need for the next couple days. It was down to breading/cooking a few pieces at a time but we made it work.
  
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  - Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    Had one manager once who traded food with Little Caesers and we all had pizza that night, it was awesome.
    
    Give the manager an “esprit de corps” account to charge the “loss” to. That way they can track the costs and decide if it’s worth it.
    
    Believe they can also get a tax write off for part of the cost.
    
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    rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    For sure, a company could do that. Waste and shrink are problems that growing companies universally experience at some point. When they expand to the point where they have departments dedicated to reducing those losses, they end up with varying levels of strict policies to combat it.
    
    My current company is a few hundred, which is a child company of many thousands. In my companies initial incarnation, before my time, they issued work credit cards to people to deal with software subscriptions and hardware needs. They ran a skeleton IT staff who just knitted everything together that people bought.
    
    until;
    
    People start buying their groceries on the cards. It was ‘snacks’. Before long it was out of fucking control and they had to pull everyone’s cards and slap the hands of even some of the management.
    
    By the time I got there, I had to be read the riot act to get a card with enough space to provision basic equipment.
    
    Our parent company takes weeks, requires seperate accounts and PO’s for any transactions what-so-ever, I’m not sure what they faced, but I suspect it’s kind of like those youtube videos where you see the guy throw the basketball overhead backward and full court and it goes in and everyone in frame absolutely loses their mind, you have to assume they had been at it for hours for the reaction to be that insane.
    
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    HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    any restaurant that doesn’t do the family meal is just asking for food theft. your esprit de corps account proves it
    
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thlibos@thelemmy.club ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yep. This is exactly why. It makes logical sense if they only thing that matters is profit. Several places that I worked would allow the public to come in and request these “about to be tossed.” items to take for free. You had sign up, provide ID, and come right at closing time, though, to do it. The employees were not allowed to do this for the reason rumba gave.

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JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Legally speaking it cannot be theft. Once it has been discarded you give up all legal rights to it.

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988)
  
  The Supreme Court held that trash placed outside the curtilage for public collection is abandoned. But the ruling explicitly notes that trash on private property remains protected and is not automatically abandoned.
  
  Courts repeatedly cite Greenwood to show that location and owner intent matter.
  
  This is why workplace trash is not public trash.
  
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