This is based on a real situation. The actual punchline is basically what a former coworker said to a friend when explaining how she got fired. We hated each other, so I’m glad to be able to steal this line and use it all these years later. I hope she’s dead in a ditch somewhere.
You however I hope are in fine health and willing to support the comic via Patreon and/or Subscribestar, or even Paypal if you like. Someday I’ll get over being sad and start posting things on time again, hopefully.

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see the rainbow
taste the unemployment
ouch

Corporate disposal rules kinda suck – a hobby store near my had these wonderful gaming tables that had taken people hundreds of hours to create & paint. They were one of the eye-grabbing displays that caught one’s eyes as you walked in. Corp said reduce the number of tables so the manager had to take ’em to the crusher and physically destroy them. Couldn’t ‘vanish’ or ‘it’s taken care of’ – no, they were built with store materials and had to be destroyed. Aargh…

If you want to get really pissed off, look at the tons of food stores all over the world destroy every year.

I’ve been pissed about that since I read “The Grapes of Wrath” lo these many years ago.

They couldn’t be sold? Seems to me that’s the kind of thing that stores exist to do…

ffs. consignment sale, at 10% would have been the ideal.

I worked at an electronics store over holiday season one year for extra cash. We recycled everything, and the crap people brought in. One guy brought in 5 iPads, all working, because he had upgraded. Once it went into the pile, all we could do is box it all up and ship it to the recycler.

Coworker found a gaming machine with 64G of really nice memory, and mentioned jokingly about rescuing the RAM. Immediately fired since manager heard him.

These rules felt childish. So, if an item doesn’t sell and is written off, NOBODY is allowed to the item anymore because it cuts into the company’s bottom line and therefore, has to be destroyed regardless of how well it works? A LOT of low-class neighborhoods would’ve stood to had benefited from these kinds of write-off items and the higher ups are throwing a hissy fit because the low-class can’t “afford” their premium priced items and now the dump pile just has to get bigger. :\

Welcome to corporate America. We’re secretly terrified of our employees and will do anything in our power to control their every move.

Another reason to hate corporate America…

the logic goes: If we give the results of accidents away, employees will contrive to create extra shrinkage so as to have more chances at free stuff

It’s dumb, but it’s internally consistent with their godforsaken view of the world

Maybe. There’s also insurance reasons; stuff that is written off as damaged is insured but if the insurance company suspects something else happened, it’s a fight. I worked at a grocery story during the great black out of…I dunno, like 2005, and we had to throw out hundreds upon hundreds of dollars of frozen and refrigerated goods. Ice cream, sure, but tons of frozen dinners and fish patties and chicken nuggets–you know, poor people food, to a large degree. Could have fed local families for weeks, if they could just keep it cold with ice for a few days. Nah, toss that shit!

Doesn’t mean we didn’t often eat or drink damaged products. Watched my co-worker down a bottle of…something with Kahlua out of a damaged 6 pack in the back room. He was 16. I can only imagine how pissed management would have been.

Who were the people that had put in hundreds of hours so these could be on display? Employees paid to do it? Or customers? Who actually owned them?

Your schadenfreude is delicious Jackie. Enjoy every drop you can get. I’m in a similar boat of being stuck with horrible people (some, just a few, most in my life are pretty good folks, but that bad ones…). Genuinely I wish there was hope for me to have my moment. Will patience be rewarded with furious vengeance, or only my death. Only time will tell. :(

Justly or not, most of the people I’ve seen get fired under similar circumstances already had one foot out the door. A valued employee can usually survive a rules sniper. If there is a desire to remove an employee, sooner or later they will get zapped with a rule violation. I barely dodged this scenario myself as my supervisor at the time wanted to make room for one of his riding club cronies.

I was let go from an old customer call service position after I written up the behavior of a client’s mother on the log after she acted like a total Karen regarding her son’s student loan information as a precaution to all the other customer service agents. Needless to say, the higher-ups did NOT take kindly to my warnings to my other fellow service agents.

That’s assuming you have management that actually values any employees. A great many of them don’t even know who is working hard and who is getting stoned out by the dumpsters on their 12th “garbage run” of the shift.

Yeah working in a commercial kitchen the amount of food that gets thrown away appalls me. Sometimes its just cause something had the wrong seasoning so it can’t be served.

In my [owner-operator run] kitchen, mistakes will often be sold at an extreme discount rather than be thrown out. Working for an owner-operator is very different from working in a corporate-run business.

The owner of the bakery that was kitty corner to the place I did undergrad instructed his closing employees to bag and “destroy” all remaining stock; “destroy” was powder the product with bleach. Several dumpster divers ended up in the hospital with convictions for burglary because state law considered garbage to be part of the building. The owner also had the gall to sue his employees for defamation when all of this came to light in local news: he won on the judgement that the employees should have known better than to follow through with illegal instructions. Illegal instructions he was never criminally investigated for.

There’s lots of people in this world who need a beating, of varying severity.

Garbage being part of the building??? I’m sorry but what in Sam Hill would make anyone believe that REFUSE would be considered PART of the building? It’s called “refuse” for a reason!

But that’s still not defamation–if he won, then he had to convince a jury that his employees were lying about him. So what was the lie?

The main reason they have that policy is because in the past people would abuse snacking rules.
Hmm I want some skittles (RIP) Opps looks like this bag is damaged.
Years ago some McDonalds near me would let the employees take home any food left over at closing.
It stopped when employees in the last hour would start taking orders from the others employees for what they wanted to take home.
As with so much abuses by a few ruin it for everyone else

Maybe if McDicks actually fed their employees, they wouldn’t feel the need to game the system in the only ways they can. Or heck, if they paid more than minimum wage. Not like they wouldn’t be able to afford either on those profit margins of theirs. If they’re gonna treat their employees like shite then there’s no surprise when the employees rebel in any way that won’t jeopardize their rent for the month

McDonalds DOES feed their employees. And they pay them more than minimum wage in most places. But they can’t afford to pay them much more; their profit margins aren’t very good, actually. Also, pretty sure the franchise owners generally negotiate wages with the employees, not corporate.

But anyway, I wouldn’t say a few people abusing the generosity ruined it for everyone else; it’s laws about liability and wrongful termination that ruin it for everyone else. It’s like rules today about using the internet for anything besides work; corporate generally doesn’t give a damn if you spend your last 10 minutes of the day reading the news, and it’s not because Becca can’t get off Facebook that everyone is banned–it’s because if they try to fire Becca for CONSTANTLY using Facebook while everyone else is free to screw around online reasonably, she can claim it’s discrimination or retaliation because she accused her boss of some BS 2 months ago. Poorly-defined rules like that invite challenges and arguments, so they instead make the rules rock-solid and aggressively enforce them, so no one can ever claim they are being singled-out.

To be fair, closed circuit cameras should be on to ensure that such abuses don’t exist. Throwing out entire closed bags is still food waste. It would’ve been more beneficial to donate unsold merchandise to food banks and volunteer centers.

At least in my area, food banks aren’t allowed to accept “leftovers.” They can take in stuff made specifically for donation, but not so-called food waste. Again, the abuses of the few screw it up for everyone else.

I can understand it if the items in question are past their expiration date and could be considered a health risk but throwing out perfectly good stock is just pedantic.

When I worked briefly at Mc D’s in the early 1980’s they had what was referred to as an “E” meal that was available at a reduced price to employees. I was not impressed. I suppose micro-management was necessary given the number of teenagers they employed but it wore me out after a couple of weeks. The next job was at a theater where the policy was if there weren’t any customers in the lobby, eat all the popcorn you want. Hot dogs were fair game after the steamer leached the red dye out of them. Candy was the only thing you didn’t mess with because it actually cost the owners money. It was a family owned business and the kids actually worked the concession stand with us.

So will we ever meet this Loss Prevention person?

Who knows – they might be someone we will grow to like even less than Wesley.

Damn the US is fucking scary!

I’ve only worked retail in the UK for 3 years but the multinational company I work for basically throws free food at everyone rather than throw it away.

We got sent in 40 bottles of whisky from a brand our store doesn’t sell and the regional manager’s response was ‘well looks like the staff who like whisky get a few free bottles if they want it’.

Well, now I know where I’m emigrating if things ever degenerate too far on this side of the pond.

Right now, there are a lot of other places in Europe that look far better than the UK right now. The rampant blatant transphobia has been directly leading to “normal” homophobia (including the typical beatings of gay people) that doesn’t get acknowledged in British large news media. There are a lot of other problems, but that’s the big one that screams out to me at the moment.

While awful if true, that’s not really going to scare away anyone not gay or trans. Doing even less than our police to control violent gangs hunting down and attacking people in broad daylight, right in front of said police, or even outright chasing police away with no consequences, is infinitely scarier.

2400 Taste The Rainbow.

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