At our job we have employee refrigeratos for staff to leave their lunches in. Some employees leave lunch boxes, food containers, and some ladies even leave there purses in the refrigerator. Now these start to stink after awhile and technically the janitors are supposed to remove all the items on certain days but some are refusing. Why? They say they dont want to be accused of stealing out of peoples private containers and some people might have medications in their purses or lunch boxes which could go bad if removed.
So my idea is it should only be management who clear out items.
At my workplace, everyone takes turns cleaning out the refrigerator, which we do every month. The managers draw up the roster and assign partners. The day before the refrigerator clean-up day, the appointed team puts out signs alerting everyone that if their items aren’t labeled, they are going into the trash. No managers are assigned to clean-up duty. That’s a perk of being a manager.
We also clean out the microwave and wipe down the counters on refrigerator clean-up day.
At my office, the cleaning crew throws out everything on the last Friday of the month. There is a sign on the fridge door that warns people that all containers will be thrown out, so it’s their own fault if they lose their stuff.
We require a sticker with name and date. Anything is fair game to be thrown out if unlabeled or after 3 days. The stickers and a pen are in a holder on the front of the fridge.
People who lose their stuff a time or two will very quickly learn how to use the stickers.
The manager is responsible for throwing items out and also the formal, once a month cleaning, which can be delegated to someone else depending on the work load. The managers rotate and some are strict and some are lenient. But, anyone can throw away out-of-date items as long as the ‘no-label’ or the ‘3 day rule’ is followed. Things do get thrown out by non-managers because of lack of space. If you are trying to put an item in and can’t find a spot, you can throw out anything out of date or unlabeled.
We are a bit assholish about this, but we do shift work and some people may not come back for a week. That, coupled with the limited space makes fridge space very valuable.
Every place I’ve ever worked the women in the office put up with the mess as long as they can then take stuff out and throw it away.
We have one man who brings in food for the entire week and takes up half the refrigerator. It’s an office of a couple of dozen people. I’ve told him to stop it a couple of times, but he starts it up again after a few weeks.
The purses need to be removed immediately. Write up a damn memo and stick it on the fridge, leave the purses in care of someone specific, whatever you have to do, but that’s step one to fix.
At my place, the contracted janitors have to deal with it: they go through the shared fridges (big shared corporate environment) each Friday afternoon, and they’re the ones who label things (I’ve seen dates Sharpied onto my stuff) so I suspect they throw things out at their own discretion. (“Man, this yogurt has been here since 5/4” toss)
Leave markers, stickers etc nearby and encourage people to use them. That helps, since a bi part of the problem seems to be people forget what they have stashed in there a.k.a. Squirrel Syndrome.
“Management expects users to manage the emptying of this fridge, (entirely, 100%), every Friday by 5pm. The first time it’s not 100% empty, it will be removed permanently. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.”
The rule where I was last was:
Anything without a name and date will be thrown away; anything more than a week old will be thrown away. No exceptions and no excuses.
This was more a week-round factory-like setting than say something like an office and it worked pretty well form us. Janitorial would hit it about every 2 to 3 days and some of us would pitch “violations” when getting our stuff. It actually worked fairly well.
Yes like **Dewey Finn **said, I bet the purse is a cooler bag that’s designed to look like a nice woman’s tote. Like this. Or a bag to disguise some other item that needs to be kept cool (medicine, pumped breast milk).
In our office one of the managers does it every few months - he sends out a email that he’ll do cleaning on Friday afternoon, if there is anything you need to save put a label or tell him, otherwise he’ll toss it. We don’t have admin staff, if we did it would make sense for that person to do it.
I was the boss and I cleaned out the fridge every Friday night. Any food was dumped and containers would be washed out and placed on a shelf in open view. I would decide what to leave or toss. Never had a complaint.
This was a large truck garage. The mechanics would clean up the floors and shop equipment and I committed to the kitchen and break room on the days we had no janitor service. I doubt I spent 5 min rinsing out containers.
I work in an office and at the end of the week there must be 20 containers in there, plus all the food that the guy who brings in a week’s worth of food containers.
We do it this way, except for the regularly scheduled part. As long as people are policing their own things, nothing is scheduled. When two or more of the admin staff don’t like the looks of the fridge, there’s a Monday announcement of a Friday purge. No containers will be opened.
The thing that drug on for an unimaginably long time was the containers of frozen cookie dough, which had been sold as a fundraiser by someone’s kid. The day they were delivered, the freezer was packed. By the end of the week, the freezer was half full. By the end of the month, a third full. And then it never got better for years EVEN THOUGH THE CONTAINERS HAD NAMES ON THEM. We moved to a new office and brought them along. Finally someone included them in a Friday purge and all was well.
