Here’s a guy who’s on welfare, but isn’t sitting on his ass-he’s working, and he takes some chocolate bars from the store dumpster for his kids, and they have the balls to FIRE HIM!
Perhaps laws are different in Canada than the US, but I thought that once anything was placed in a trash container, or put at curb, it was no longer considered your “property” and could be legally snagged by any passerby who desired it.
There’s nothing in the linked article to indicate that Mr. Masse threw out salable merchandise and later helped himself to it, in fact another article on the same incident used the word “expired” regarding the candy, so it was likely past it’s sell by date, that being the reason it was in the shitcan to begin with.
Some of the quotes by store representatives are of the jaw-dropping variety-one gem:
Bad employee, my mistletoe covered ass! GRR! :mad:
Kudos to Sun Youth Org. for reaching out to this gentleman and his family after him being pissed on.
Back when I was in retail, it was a firm policy of every store I worked in that employees could not take from what the store was throwing out. Termination was one of the possible penalties for doing so.
A small nitpick: the chocolates hadn’t been thrown out yet, and were still on the premises. I seem to recall hearing that there was some procedure by which the chocolates were to be returned to the manufacturer to be destroyed, or something like that. Still, I completely agree with your rant. It’s horrifically wasteful for stores to destroy food and other goods like that.
Once when I was a deli clerk at Publix, my manager had me throw away about a dozen fully cooked turkey dinners. These were entire meals folks. One day past the expiration date, maybe not even that. Garbage. It was a horrible thing
My wife works as a human resources administrator for the very same store chain.
I shared the OP’s outrage until I brought this thread to my wife’s attention. Apparently it is a well known store policy, and the man in question freely admitted he knew what he was doing was wrong. What the hell else could the store do ?
Grocery stores go through a lot of shrink (loss). If a product is expired, it presents a liability to the store if anyone consumes it and gets sick, so officially, no one gets anything. Unofficially is a different story; unfortunately, this guy got caught by what I can assume was someone who didn’t like him.
If it makes you feel any better, anything that didn’t contain meat was composted for use to feed the cattle, or so I was told. It was taken away seperately by our trucks, so I assume it was used for something good, else we would’ve tossed it at the store level.
Yep, when I was at Kmart, our favorite manager was fired for taking some old lawn chairs from the dumpster.
I think it’s insane. I always thought that putting something in the trash made it fair game-basically you were saying, “I no longer want or claim ownership of this.”
The issue is this: if you let employees salvage discarded stock, some employees may abuset he largess by discarding stock solely for the purpose of salvaging it later.
Postal workers also cannot take anything out of their garbage, even if it’s bulk undeliverable junk mail, magazines, or other not-personal mail. A number of years ago, Amazon mailed out “customer appreciation” presents via bulk rate mail, non-returnable, and due to people having moved and no longer having a valid forwarding address, a lot of (IIRC) undeliverable mousepads went into the garbage.
I suspect policies like this are in place to help prevent stealing of items that an employee could claim were in the garbage.
I used to work with a guy who had been a manager at one of the Sirloin Stockade type steak houses. The policy there had been that the employees could take home any steaks that had been incorrectly cooked (medium instead of medium rare, and so on). He immediately put a stop to that. He said that after a few days of the employees watching tens of pounds of prime steak going into the dumpster, the number of “incorrectly” cooked steaks dropped dramatically.
When I worked at Circle K for a bit in grad school, my boss winked at the policy of throwing away expired sandwiches. For about three months, I survived on the stuff.
I just can’t get my back up about this. Sucks that the guy is (re)unemployed and on welfare, but he brought about this situation himself. He could have asked for the candy. Instead, he tried to get something for nothing. He risked his job, and therefore his family’s welfare, for some free candy that he probably could have had for the asking. So, who’s the asshole?
You would not believe how difficult it is to throw away out of date foods. We literally destroy it, uncarton it, thaw it, mix it and bury it under bathroom or chemical waste and still only discard hours before the dumpster is due to be emptied. We can’t take the chance of someone getting sick from it and can’t guarantee that they won’t. You would also not believe how difficult it is to donate unexpired food to local charities. Most of them will only take shelf stable, individually packaged, labelled for retail sale foods. Half gallon of ice cream? Nope, not individually packaged. Chunk of cheese? Nope, not labelled for retail sale, there’s not nutritional label. Quart of milk, 5#tub of cottage cheese, extra potato salad, day old bread…dumpster.
They do let us take out of code food home, though. I guess ‘the man’ doesn’t care about us. But if it was company policy and he knew it before hand, I feel less bad for him. Sometimes life sorta sucks that way.
That’s one trick of many. I used to work as kind of a undercover peer spy security person at the grocery store I worked in through high school. I busted people for all kinds of things. Some of their cleverness was incredible and many a plot involved the dumpsters. I caught another employee loading up expensive meat and things and then eventually get into the dumpster while others were closing up and then coming back hours after close in the dark to get it. Boy was he surprised when the police jumped up as he went into the dumpster. He had been using stolen meat to supply his father’s restaurant for God knows how long. The take was well into the thousands.
A lesser trick was for people to damage things just enough on purpose, throw them away, and then come back to get them later. I can see how taking away that excuse is a good idea. You wouldn’t really know that unless you know the inner workings of retail.
My linked article doesn’t indicate if Mr. Masse knew that the taking was against store policy, said policy not being attached. If he knew, and anyone can cite that he did, then my OP is rendered moot.
That said, how was the man in any way, shape, or form hurting the retailer?
Such policies and the consequences of failure to follow them are generally spelled out in some sort of employee handbook. Typically, the employee must sign a form at the time of hire to the effect that he has received a copy of the handbook and that he has read and understood it. Signing this form constitutes an agreement that the employee is aware of company policies, whether or not he actually did read it.
This really isn’t the point of this type of policy. As pointed out by others, it is to prevent unscrupulous employees from stealing by using the trash to get merchandise out of the store. Retail companies have a generally low tolerance for internal theft, since it is one of the single greatest sources of inventory shrinkage. If the company lets someone like Mr. Masse get away with even an ostensibly honest and well-intentioned violation of an established policy, then it would provide some level of protection for dishonest employees who want to steal, by giving them potential grounds for a wrongful termination lawsuit: “Well, Mr. Masse did it and HE didn’t get fired!”
It may not be fair, but I assure you, it is necessary.
I have a lot of friends that worked at supermarkets, and all of them looked forward to “cull” days when they could take home as much free expired food as they could handle. These places did not have widespread theft- why steal what you can get for free? and I think these companies get more in goodwill from the respect the workers have for them than they lose.
There are also many, many, many dumpsters where you can get perfectly good food that is one day expired. I’m talking about whole dumpsters brimming with wrapped bread. From what I know a lot of merchants have a very ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ attitude when it comes to dumpster divers as long as they don’t leave behind a mess. These places are widely known and frequented.