Both fast food chains I’ve worked at, in two states, had the same rule - your half-price meal (or free meal if you were a manager) had to be eaten on the premises. If you wanted food to go, you could still get a 20% discount on it, though.
I worked at Burger King for 4 years. I ate the food every day that I was on the premises.
More than a decade since I left, BK is still my favorite fast-food joint.
This is why I love posting on this board. 
There’s nothing that beats a post from someone with first hand experience.
Apparently this policy is common within the industry.
The reporter ahould have pointed that out in the article.
I worked in a Hostess Bakery* for a while. Their rule was you could eat all you wanted, so long as it was consumed onsite. I was astonished when the manager told me this, thinking of long heavenly days eating every Twinkie and Cupcake in sight. He assured me overuse wouldn’t be a problem after a few weeks. He was right.
*They made bread too. That smell never got old.
The lawsuit wasn’t about the policy itself- the employees claimed that if they had to eat the discounted meals on-site, they were working/on call and Taco Bell was required to pay them for the break.
A friend in Highschool worked at a McDonalds. They had discounted food for employees, but in addition employees could eat “old” food for free. We used to show up when he was due for his break. He’d come out with a bag full of all the food that was going to be thrown out, and we’d gorge on it for free.
We actually planned our Friday night activities around his work schedule.
I work in the food industry and it’s generally the policy that discounted food is just for your break. The main reason is that it draws a line between discounted food while you’re on a break and employees seeming to think they have an ‘employee discount’ that they don’t actually have. Even with our very clear 50% off food eaten on premise rule, people forget and/or drift away from the rule and will abuse it. We’ll see employees grabbing a sandwich for their friends as their leaving and take 50% off, people taking 50% off of their personal shopping stuff or even just ‘extending’ their ‘employee discount’ to friends that come in to the store (which is basically stealing). “50% off food that you eat here” makes it much clearer.
The other reason for charging something, as opposed to just making it free is that if you don’t place at least some value on it, people will take it because it’s free. If you want a sandwich, that’s fine, but if you take a sandwich, a salad, a soda, two kinds of pasta salad and a couple of cookies and then throw away most of it, it’s just a waste and you wouldn’t do it if you paid for half of it.
Someone I knew owned a steakhouse. He charged his employees 10 or 20% of the menu prices for anything they wanted. One day we asked why he even bothered. If you’re going to charge $3.00 for a $30 meal, why not just give it to them? He said that charging something made the difference between them taking something that actually wanted and could eat and them taking something for no reason other than because it was free, even if they didn’t want it. The weren’t going to turn down free steak, even if it was going to sit in their fridge at home for two days and get tossed.
And, FTR, if you bought discounted food for your break and don’t finish it, it’s not that we’ll make you throw it away, so long as you’re not doing that to bring it home.
Remember, all that food has to be paid for. If the employee doesn’t [fully] pay for it, the owner is paying for it. Most owners aren’t looking to feed your friends or keep your fridge full.
One last thing, the discounted food for your break is a perk, but it’s also an incentive to keep employees from leaving on their break. Employees that are just hanging around in the backroom for a half hour on their break are much more likely to be back at work on time and sober.
Great post JoeyP.
Your insight and experience managing employees is spot on. Thank you for sharing.
I worked at McDonald’s in high school, too. Meals were half-priced on breaks and after your shift, but we weren’t allowed to eat or distribute food from the warmer that had timed out; that would have incentivized the deliberate preparation of too much food.
Heh, yep!
My experience as a supervisor is limited to heading up a programming team. My biggest responsibility is assigning tasks, setting goals and meeting deadlines.
Supervising fast food or store workers is a lot more challenging. I’d be completely lost without a lot of training.
I don’t know that this is the reasoning but ------- around here fast food joints tend to be in clusters with friends sometimes working at neighboring chains or making friends in them. Sometimes its been a thing for the folks at McDonalds, Subway and TB to swap lunches. When its (ahem) on the border between the first and last with everyone sitting on the curb together, the managers just didn’t think it “looked good”. A greater sin to most managers was eating in the neighboring joint; people were required to cover, change or flip their uniform shirt when doing that.
I worked at fast food and other restaurants during my teens. I ate all my discounted meals in the restaurant and wouldn’t have given any thought about trying to transfer it to a family member or eat it off hours.
It’s a perk for the employee, and AFAIK they are under no obligation to provide it. Why anyone would complain about constraints around an optional perk is beyond me.
If a fast-food place gave their employees bags of gold, there’d be someone complaining about how heavy they were.
Because while in uniform and in the building, you’re effectively on-call.
I just heard a comedian do a routine about the menu at a Mexican restaurant being explained to someone who has never tried the cuisine:
“Ok, so tell me about the… taco?”
“A taco has beef, cheese, lettuce, and beans in a tortilla.”
“That sounds good. What about a burrito?”
“A burrito has beef, cheese, lettuce, and beans in a tortilla.”
“Interesting. And a chimichanga?”
“A chimichange has beef, cheese, lettuce, and beans in a tortilla.”
“I’m sensing a pattern here. What about a tostada?”
“A tostada has beef, cheese, lettuce, and beans on a tortilla.”
Your friend is very wise. There was a study done that people took a lot more free candy than candy which costs just one cent. Free is psychologically viewed as very different from very cheap.
Yeah? So?
They are still under no obligation to offer a discounted meal to you. It’s a mutually beneficial perk, not an entitlement. Another option would be to remove the discount, then you go eat somewhere else besides your place of work or eat your sack lunch, like 95% of the rest of the world. There’s no such thing as a “free lunch” (i.e. they give you the food so you’re effectively on-call), and beggers can’t be choosers.
I honestly can’t remember a single time I had to run back to the register with a half-eaten sandwich because something happened. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. it probably did, but If it happened, it certainly didn’t happen very often.
Jim Gaffigan