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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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this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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A manager doesn't have discretion to dispose of out of date stock in any other way than putting it in the bin?
Why would you even have the position of Manager then?
Corporate joints, they figure if they don't waste the food people would be motivated to see food is wasted that could be used. And it would prevent managers from slipping in expired food they aren't supposed to use anyway because they are under pressure to lower waste costs. So they throw out food rather than let anyone have it.
Plus if you feed someone, they aren't going to be buying food. It's completely just a theoretical self serving philosophy, that's why I refuse to work for corporate joints like that.
It's also 'theft' and 'damage of reputation' by these companies. They believe by giving away food to homeless people, that purchasing customers will see that, believe the brand is dirty and not buy their product.
It's fucking madness.
Offloading of actual work + the illusion of power over your situation
The biggest impediment to donating foodstuffs by grocery stores is most often governmental food safety regulations. A store just can't take foods it needs to pull off the self and donate it. It can be onerous to get the special permission to do things like this. And yes, management is too lazy to jump through all the hoops and put out the effort to try as it often stands.
I highly recommend working with your local government to make it easier for a grocery store to donate foods.
Maybe outside the US, but we have Good Samaritan laws at the federal level to expedite charitable donations from corporations. Any rules you may have encountered, in the US, were put in place voluntarily by the company.
Source: Food Safety Manager that went to war over this exact issue with a pizza hut franchise and won.
Yeah, most excuses I hear are really just excuses. Even had a shop refuse to sell me something after its best before date despite it being on the shelf at a reduced price. They said its illegal to sell it to me - no it isn't, there is another shop just round the corner which makes that their entire business model by selling reduced stuff past its best before date.
Had I been feeling more argumentative I would have been tempted to leave the money on the counter and just walk off with it. Yes it is kinda stealing, but no one is going to enforce that. "So you are saying he left the money on the counter and walked off with it? Yeah stop wasting our time"
Only because we let corporations write off the value of the food they donate to charity, off their taxes. Canada does not let them do that, and they have a lot less donations to food banks as a result.
It's all quid pro quo stuff, you notice food banks make you prove you live in the area with a piece of mail, they aren't giving it out to anyone, it's a charity that harvests tax write offs.
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.
Legally speaking it cannot be theft. Once it has been discarded you give up all legal rights to it.
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.
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.
Didn't Eskimos throw sociopaths off cliffs?
Why doesn't the conversation end there?
Begging your pardon, but Eskimo is considered pejorative. The people in question called themselves Inuit.
Not considered.
Is.
As far as I'm aware of, no.
and because capitalism
You think they would if we asked nicely.
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.
Not too many cliffs were they're from. Now ice floes OTOH, lots. And it was the elderly. And rarely.
that's because they didn't have my relatives :), I pine for the ice floes
If you don't trust someone to appropriately handle waste, you don't trust them enough to be a manager.
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.
They trusted him for 10 years, presumably until someone turned him in.
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.
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.
*Well they apparently solved that problem
edit* added a line
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.
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.
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.
Don't go to work in a corporate enterprise :) You'll end up sorely disappointed in most places.
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.
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.
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.
any restaurant that doesn't do the family meal is just asking for food theft. your esprit de corps account proves it
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.
I was thinking simpler. Just give the decision power to managers, but allow them to use it to reward/celebrate their employees.
I've had two credit cards for work in my career. On one I bought a book (one single book). On the other one I bought . . . nothing - not one single thing. But I was required to get it because I once paid for required training on my own card then put in for reimbursement (as I was told to do). Corporate went nuts because I didn't do it their way - use the company card I didn't have at the time.
Lots of rules like this in large corporate outfits.
If you think this is crazy look into musical instrument disposal policies. It's disgusting
I tried but got a lot of hits on positive sounding stuff. I believe you, I just don’t see what you’re seeing.
https://news.iheart.com/featured/ken-dashow/content/2017-10-23-do-guitar-companies-really-order-retailers-to-smash-flawed-instruments/
So the manager in the original post probably brought some day old baked goods that would have been thrown in the garbage. The gas station I worked at had a lock on the bin so people wouldn't easily rummage through the bins for things like day old goods. Because it causes problems downstream to clean up after people dumpster dive. The other thing that can happen is something dumb happens somewhere, and some senior management (maybe even VP) sends out a memo that bans anyone from doing anything but what is now written policy. Lowest common denominator situation.
Basically upper management doesn't trust boots on the ground so they make broad sweeping rules that they strictly enforce.
I'm no longer allowed to use a work vehicle when running errands and also stop by a drive through even though that exact process was described as "managers discretion" in the policy/procedure.
.... Because one person elsewhere got rear-ended in a drive through, all 250+ branches of my company can no longer allow it's delivery drivers to pick up food on the way back to branch.
I'm assuming the person in the original post has a policy in place that is exactly saying don't do what he did
Of course it’s Gibson. Dogshit company with over-priced instruments pissed that better alternatives exist so they desperately try to ride on nostalgia and bullshit.
God DAMN that's a great question