This Manager Had One Creative Way Of Eliminating Cost
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“I used to work at Arby’s. The general manager there had an unwritten policy: every fourth or fifth order that went out the drive-thru must have a ‘forgotten’ item, and no receipts were to be put in those bags. That way people couldn’t prove something they ordered was missing.
His reason behind this was that it saved a few hundred dollars a month in food costs, and that money went straight into his pockets.
To fight this, I randomly added free items to orders to balance it out. Forget that guy and his food costs.”
“My Faith In Humanity Was Lost That Day”
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“This actually happened just a few weeks ago and helped me lose faith in humanity to boot.
I work as a stock clerk at a family owned grocery store. Part of my job is putting the ingredients the bakery department receives away in the freezer until they come and use it. Someone in shipping stacked the order poorly and a case of frozen donuts was buried on the bottom of a few hundred pounds of boxes. One might expect that a crushed cardboard box stored at 0 degrees Fahrenheit might not survive, especially when it’s marked ‘Do not crush,’ but that’s beside the point.
After a good eight hours in the freezers of working stock to the shelves and putting other departments’ stock away, I came upon this box. I figured that if I was careful enough and picked it up from the bottom, it would be fine, right? All of the donuts were in a plastic bag inside of the box anyway. No such luck. As soon as I picked it up, the box fell to pieces, and the bag inside had been torn at some point so a good hundred donuts fell onto the freezer floor (something which has never been cleaned in all of the 20+ years the store has been open).
Now, I’d been working there for three years, I know that a manager has to take inventory of the lost product and in the case of a packaging error, get a refund from the supplier, no loss to the store. My shift was now over, so I went to tell my manager what happened before I left. I got the reply, ‘Before you clock out, just go pick them (the donuts) up, brush them off, and send them to the bakery anyway.’
Keep in mind that there was now dirt and who knows what else frozen onto them. Thankfully, the other manager was around for me to get a second opinion from and the donuts were tossed and I got to keep my job, but I can’t ever get a donut from there again.”
The Prime Rib Incident
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“I used to work at a country club as a busser. One day, when I was taking back a tray of dirty dishes to the dishwashing station, I noticed that there was a plate with a slice of prime rib and veggies which looked like it was just prepared that was left on the dishwashing station. I thought someone just was in a rush and left the plate there without throwing the food away, so I threw it away.
It turns out there was a server who was in a rush and left the plate there to come back and grab as their hands were full. They were frantically looking for this plate of food when I told them I threw it away. He asked me why and I told him I didn’t know it was to be served and I asked him why he left it in the dishwashing station and not under the heat lamps.
He then prompted to grab a clean plate, get some veggies from the chef’s station (who stepped away for a moment) and grabbed the prime rib from the trash. I just stood there because I thought I was being messed with but he then took the food out to the dining room and at that moment I realized he was not messing with me. I followed close behind him and as soon as he walked away from the table he was serving the plate to, I walked up to the diner and said: ‘I am sorry but this plate was intended for another table,’ and walked away with the plate as the diner was complaining to the other guests at his table.
I walked back into the kitchen with the plate and went to the head chef and told her what happened. She called the server into the kitchen and told him: ‘Get out of my kitchen before I shove this prime rib up your butt.’
Of course, the server denied everything, but the chef was not having it. She then told the general manager who officially fired the server after reviewing the security footage of the kitchen.”
This Seems Like A Rampant Problem In The Industry
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“My restaurant has fired 20 head chefs since its inception two years ago. The food and beverage manager who hired them never gets into any trouble.
The kitchen staff members work 39 hours so that management doesn’t have to offer them benefits, and are extremely underpaid on top of that.
Most of the managers make $30/hour spend a good chunk of their time on smoke breaks. Meanwhile, the owner who inherited his riches bought two Lamborghinis with the profits from one quarter alone.
The worst part is, many of our employees who work multiple jobs say the same thing about other restaurants where they work.”
You Can’t Always Trust The Label
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“I once worked in the warehouse at a food processing plant that was also supposedly kosher. I came in one day, and the warehouse was half empty, so I asked what was going on. I was told that the rabbis were in checking the facility and all of the non-kosher ingredients had been moved to our off-site warehouse.
Kosher means the food is prepared under strict religious guidelines. The company was rated as being kosher, yet they were using non-kosher ingredients and hiding the fact from the rabbis who inspect the products as well as the customers.”
They’re Still Humans
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“I worked at a maximum security prison a few years back. One of my lieutenants was a real jerk (lack of a better word) who would use his position to force guards to do his bidding even when the action violated basic human rights.
I was working in our solitary wing one night and it was about time for me to feed breakfast to the wing. On this wing, the offenders are locked up one person in a cell and they do not come out so I have to hand out food trays one by one to each cell. Well, about 20 minutes before I had to start feeding the offenders, my lieutenant called me and said that ‘the inmate in Cell 23 isn’t hungry today.’ I asked him what he meant, and he just repeated himself.
This really ticked me off for a few reasons, A) I am in no position to deny another human a meal B) if I don’t feed him he could take me to court for human rights violation and I know that the lieutenant would deny ever telling me not to feed him C) if I do feed him I could be labeled as ‘inmate friendly’ and my credibility could be tarnished with the other guards.
I ended up feeding the entire wing except for him. While my inmate trustee (offender that acts as the janitor for the wing) was cleaning up the food trays, I took a tray to the guy that ‘wasn’t hungry,’ and told him that I didn’t know what he did to anger off my lieutenant nor did I care. I also told him that if asked he was not fed and to deny ever getting a food tray and that he had five minutes to clean off his tray before the trustee came to clean it. No one ever knew that the guy was fed except for me, the trustee, and the guy, so I was able to dodge a pretty serious situation.
I ended up quitting a few months after this happened.”
You Can’t Treat Customers This Way
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“I used to be a waiter at a local Italian restaurant and bar.
I remember there being a deaf person that would frequent the bar area and he could read lips, so he could communicate by speaking as no one knew sign language but he was shy about speaking because he knew he sounded different.
I distinctly remember one of the owners of the place walk up to him, cover his mouth and say: ‘You sound like a big old choo-choo train,’ in a high voice, mocking the customer.
I quit about a week later.”
This Former Bartender Isn’t Proud Of Their Past
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“Between two and three decades ago, I was bartending to make some money while being a student. My family was poor, so I had to make some money at that time, and bartending was a great job since I could do it in some of the evenings after homework and during the weekends.
The majority of our customers were regulars, and I just observed the more experienced staff and did exactly what they did, never asked questions, never allowed myself to voice an opinion, pretty much keeping my head down, trying to be a good bartender and making as much money as I could. And sloppy customers often tip well.
At the end of a shift, there was basically no customer left who wasn’t completely tanked. We talk about folks who could barely stand on their feet. I would watch those men and woman crawling into their cars and driving home. I always waited like 20 minutes or so after closing time, then jumped on my bicycle and went home.
I never heard about any accidents except for some dents. Obviously, I did not work there longer than absolutely necessary, and never went back to be a bartender.
Looking back now, this isn’t something I’m proud of.”
“No One Will Know”
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“During my senior year of high school, I worked part-time in a restaurant kitchen.
The chef cooked a platter-full of chicken drumsticks. A server was carrying the chicken to the restaurant floor when they tripped, dropping most of the drumsticks on the kitchen floor.
Rather than throw them out, the chef instructed the server to ‘give them a quick rinse and blot them dry with paper towels – no one will know.'”
They Should Have Left It To The Experts
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“I work in London, so we have a pretty bad rodent problem in the area. One day, a rat ran into our store and hid underneath the sweet aisle. We tried looking for it, but Mr. Rat was nowhere to be found. An exterminator was called out and humane traps were put down. However, for a good fortnight, we kept finding chewed up chocolate bars, holes in bread and biscuit packs, and poop everywhere, so again we called pest control, who escalated it up to sticky traps.
A customer with clearly nothing better to do with their time noticed pest control in our store and they decided to complain to the Environmental Health Organisation with a very fabricated story of how we have rats (plural, even though pest control confirmed it was only one from the evidence they found) and that it was disgusting that we were not doing anything about it. EHO came into our store unannounced one day to take a look. We were basically told that we need to get rid of the rat or we’d fail our check. So out came the exterminator again, and we told them that they needed to clear the rat out by any means possible.
My manager called me over and asked if I was ok with rats. I said yes, so he replied with, ‘Right, I want you to stand here and if any rat runs at you, I want you to cave its skull in.’
I was absolutely horrified by this, so I refused and walked away to the other side of the store where the tills were. I knew what was going to happen and to this day I can still hear the squeals from that animal as its skull was caved in by someone else. Yes, we were still open and serving customers as this was happening, because my manager still wanted his money.
There was also the time when a different manager (but the same company) told me to put undercooked food in the hot food counter because it was taking too long to cook in his opinion. Again, I refused.”
He Was A Good Guy Despite His Many Shortcomings
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“I used to work at a seafood restaurant owned by a crazy Russian guy. There were a lot of sketchy things he would do.
He would sell food that was borderline bad. I never saw anything that would have gotten someone sick, just food that had been sitting under a heat lamp all day or ‘live’ crabs that were alive when he bought them but then flash-steamed and reheated later
Everything on the menu was labeled ‘fresh’ when, in fact, other than the live crabs, everything was frozen. I didn’t get that because we sold ‘fresh’ lobster tails, but not whole lobsters even though, in order for a lobster to be fresh, it needs to be alive. Anyone who knew anything about seafood could see straight through it.
On larger checks that were paid in cash, he would void after the table left so he wouldn’t have to pay as much in taxes. I’d would usually have between three and five of these checks a night which would be $100-$300 cash and we would run four servers a night so that’s a pretty significant chunk of change.
He would pay us half under the table.
He burnt down one of our buildings (we had two separate dining building) for insurance money, claiming one of the box fans used to dry the carpets caught the mini blinds on fire. Also, this was the second time this restaurant burned down, the first time was eight years before by the previous owner.
He did most of the renovations on the burnt down building without any permits, often using incorrect materials. We put in wood floors with a varnish that was highly flammable and when the inspector came he was like seriously we don’t need a third fire. The inspector came back a few weeks later and my boss told him we redid it, but really, we just aired out the building and you couldn’t smell it anymore. The whole place had house paint tile that is not approved for industrial kitchens.
That’s just a few of the things he did, and despite all of this, he was still one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. He cared about his employees, just not so much the law. We celebrated holidays together as many of my coworkers didn’t have a family, so he’d make a Turkey and all the fixings for Thanksgiving, he got us all Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Valentine’s Day gifts.
He’s a really good guy, he just likes to bend a few rules.”
Where To Begin?
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“I used to work for a potato chip company.
We had two big bins that can hold close to 80,000 pounds of potatoes. One bin used to carry ‘organic’ and the other had regular potatoes. Each bin was supposed to have its own oil supply to prevent the two types of potatoes from cross-contaminating.
The owner of our company used to tell us when we are making organic potato chips mix them with regular potatoes, and to not let quality control find out. Organic potatoes were expensive as was the organic oil, so we used to mix non-organic potatoes and non-organic oil to make 100% organic potato chips.
Another time at that company, we had the city come and put a machine in the sewage system to check how much of ‘dirty water’ our chips company sent out. If the water was too dirty, we were charged a hefty sum of money. My boss used to instruct us to connect the fresh water hookup to the drainage system while the machine was working, which meant we used to pump fresh water from a hose to the drain system to trick the system.
The owner was a jerk. I’m glad I left that dumpster fire a long time ago.”
Just When You Thought You Fixed The Problem
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“The new manager (who took over my place of work after everyone in the bar got fired for thousands of dollars in product missing) told me to pour the really cheap stuff into the top shelf bottles. He said it was to save money.
I refused, as this kind of action can actually send you to prison in Texas. He hated me after that and wrote me up for the dumbest reasons. I had been with the company for years and trained every single person including the new manager.
He finally fired me and replaced me with a girl who didn’t know the difference between lemons and limes (as a bartender, this is pretty important).”
There Was Only So Much They Could Do
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“I used to work at a restaurant where I took the delivery orders over the phone.
One of our regulars was a dialysis patient. She would order $60 worth of food, which was obviously much more than she could eat. She was clearly on some medications for her conditions, and not completely in her right mind.
I used to ask my boss to refuse to sell to her, but he didn’t listen and continued the practice.”
Employee Mistreatment, I’m Not Loving It
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“I work at a McDonald’s restaurant and sometimes have to work the overnight shifts. By their own agreement, they are required to provide workers a half-hour break if they work more than five hours or something along those lines.
While doing overnights, they will tell you to register for your half-hour (unpaid might I add) break, but you must continue working regardless.
Seems shady to me and totally unfair particularly due to how tiring those shifts can be when they extend into the eight-or-nine-hour ranges.”
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