You should let the pantry know as well. They can be a force that could change this. They can let folks that go to the pantry know not to go to those kind of gas stations and also have them call corporate.
I mean the food pantry is apparently the food pantry in creston illinois if that helps
Joe should see a lawyer about a wrongful termination lawsuit.
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (pdf) brought to law in 1996 shields most liability for people donating food exactly like he did.
This may have been a knee-jerk reaction from the employer incorrectly assuming they could be liable if someone got sick. Though its also possible they’ve been looking for a reason to dismiss a long time employee to replace him with a cheaper one. Corporate ownership makes me leans towards the latter.
Liability if the food is bad. He was fired because the company perceives it as theft. The act does not cover that.
Same reason grocery stores toss perfectly good food in locked dumpsters in lieu of donating it.
The only chain place with fresh food that donates their extra at the end of the day is Panera.
And this is exactly why by law Italian supermarkets have to donate anything approaching its sell-by date.
Oh fuck. We need that law in the states.
They’ll get there. The US is still working through the Italian playbook. They’re up to the 1930s.
Fuck, too accurate.
On the surface it seems like you’re being encouraging. Too bad i’ve skimmed a history book at least once in my life.
😭
Maybe… I guess Id rather see a law that makes it illegal to stop someone from gathering or donating discarded food. I dont want a restaurant or grocery store to have to fuck around with record keeping and shit. I just want them to have to allow someone to do the right thing if it’s not going to be them doing the right thing.
Interesting, here in the UK they sell it at a discount, which greatly helps us poorer people afford food.
Ironically if it’s all donated to food banks instead, I’d never see it and would struggle more - I may be poor but I can afford food so I don’t want to take away from what others might need more than me.
The whole system is sadly broken anyway, so much food, yet so many hungry :-(
There’s a place near me that sells under-selling, damaged package, and past-sell-by-date processed food for a super steep discount. It’s priced like being in the 90s or early 00s. They buy it from grocery store distributors who collect items that are “returned” to them by the store, and it’s run by Amish which don’t seem bound by quite the same regulations…? Not entirely sure how they are allowed to do that, though there’s another place in the opposite direction that isn’t Amish and does the same thing, so maybe it’s just allowed here.
Since most packaged food is still good well beyond the sell-by date, this means I can buy dry goods, shelf-stable microwave meals, and condiment sauces, and fill my car trunk/boot for about $100. It’s pretty out of the way, so I only make it there every few months, but I stock up heavily when I go. I’d probably have needed food assistance or just starved if I hadn’t found that place. (I prefer not to use it since my understanding is that it’s not a forever benefit even if you need it forever, and circumstances may warrant use later)
Have to be super careful about what sorts of things you buy, some of it goes stale or separates a lot faster than other things, but it’s all still edible, and if I get stuff that’s not tasty to me, my chickens eat it and poop out eggs, so it’s not really a loss.
I just recently became a department manager at a grocery store.
For us, any product close to expiry has three options. Reduce price by half, put product on FlashFood (an app for connecting grocers and shoppers to sell product at steep discounts), or freeze product at or before expiration date and donate to the food bank. Depending on the product, some can also be reused as an ingredient for the meals section. The goal is zero food waste for the whole corporation by 2030. The only exception to that I guess would be damaged product (punctured packaging, bad seal, etc).
We’re the only super power that refuses to agree that food and water are a human right.
They used to dump them in unlocked dumpsters but people figured that out and started pilfering the dumpsters. My dad, not poor at all but quite frugal/cheap, somehow heard about this and started taking me as a kid to go dumpster diving with him. It was crazy the amount of food we brought home for those couple years before places started locking the dumpsters. And there were a lot of people driving up and going through them just like us.
There was an entire documentary about people dumpster diving at grocery stores for free food.
That documentary is called: Dive! Living Off America’s Waste.
Here’s a trailer for it.
And here’s the full documentary on YouTube.
Crazy to me that it was filmed in 2010. My experience dumpster diving was as a kid in the 80s in Phoenix and as I mentioned, the stores started locking things up and so it stopped. Or so I thought… it seems in many areas it was and maybe still is occurring. Perhaps locking dumpsters is too much of a hassle for some places. Anyway, thanks for sharing!
I didn’t really consider the reason the company gave for the dismissal. Though it occurs to me now that any incident where someone loses their job due to donating food nearing expiry could be plausibly written up as thievery by the company doing the firing.
Which is a nuance that might be worth chatting to a lawyer about.
deleted by creator
I want to know who narc’d on Joe.
That person deserves an ass beating.
I remember once the heat broke in the middle of winter at my work. I wore a unbranded brownish orange beanie because it was effing cold. I was told to remove it because hats were against dress code. When a customer asked me why I wasn’t wearing my beanie I told them the truth. Management told me to take it off because it violated dress code. I was taken to the back for a disciplinary meeting for being “unprofessional”. Then let me wear the fucking hat if talking about not wearing it is making you look bad.
A manager doesn’t have discretion to dispose of out of date stock in any other way than putting it in the bin?
Why would you even have the position of Manager then?
Lots of rules like this in large corporate outfits.
If you think this is crazy look into musical instrument disposal policies. It’s disgusting
I tried but got a lot of hits on positive sounding stuff. I believe you, I just don’t see what you’re seeing.
So the manager in the original post probably brought some day old baked goods that would have been thrown in the garbage. The gas station I worked at had a lock on the bin so people wouldn’t easily rummage through the bins for things like day old goods. Because it causes problems downstream to clean up after people dumpster dive. The other thing that can happen is something dumb happens somewhere, and some senior management (maybe even VP) sends out a memo that bans anyone from doing anything but what is now written policy. Lowest common denominator situation.
Basically upper management doesn’t trust boots on the ground so they make broad sweeping rules that they strictly enforce.
I’m no longer allowed to use a work vehicle when running errands and also stop by a drive through even though that exact process was described as “managers discretion” in the policy/procedure.
… Because one person elsewhere got rear-ended in a drive through, all 250+ branches of my company can no longer allow it’s delivery drivers to pick up food on the way back to branch.
I’m assuming the person in the original post has a policy in place that is exactly saying don’t do what he did
Of course it’s Gibson. Dogshit company with over-priced instruments pissed that better alternatives exist so they desperately try to ride on nostalgia and bullshit.
Why would you even have the position of Manager then?
God DAMN that’s a great question
The biggest impediment to donating foodstuffs by grocery stores is most often governmental food safety regulations. A store just can’t take foods it needs to pull off the self and donate it. It can be onerous to get the special permission to do things like this. And yes, management is too lazy to jump through all the hoops and put out the effort to try as it often stands.
I highly recommend working with your local government to make it easier for a grocery store to donate foods.
Maybe outside the US, but we have Good Samaritan laws at the federal level to expedite charitable donations from corporations. Any rules you may have encountered, in the US, were put in place voluntarily by the company.
Source: Food Safety Manager that went to war over this exact issue with a pizza hut franchise and won.
Offloading of actual work + the illusion of power over your situation
This is very much wrong, and something I’ve always disagreed with.
The reasoning behind it, is ‘conflict of interest’ (I’m just passing on the reason I was told when I worked for 7-11). The employees in the store look at a ‘product forcast’, decide how many cookies to make (heat up some pre-made dough) and package for sale. If they are permitted to keep or donate expiring product: they may intentionally make more than needed, ensuring they get free stuff. This goes for all of 7-11s ‘made in house’ (assembled as best, usually just re-heated. Fried Chicken was the closest to ‘fresh’ they sell) products. Cookies, sandwiches, hot food, etc.
I get that viewpoint; but I think they should punish abuse of the system, not outright prohibit saving perfectly good food, if nearly expiring/expired, for good causes like the needy/homeless.
The guys at my local 7-11 treat my nephew like their little brother and will give him a bunch of extra food if he goes there towards the evening. “Here take an extra hot dog” kind of thing.
Nice :)
Some of the managers are very nice and are happy to bend obviously stupid rules, others have a massive stick jammed deeep up inside their rectum…
The manager that hired me, re-wrote my employment contract and forged my signature on the new one, to put me as part-time instead of full time. Didn’t find out until 3mo later when I asked about my benefits package to the manager that replaced her and got confused looks/responses.
I even see that as bs. My friend worked for BK back in the 80’s when they were still decent and tacitly the manager would stop over making of food but he erred on the side of over and they took stuff home and it was a nice little perk. Now granted if its abused to the point they are like reselling the stuff then yeah you gotta nail them. It just blows me away how bad minimum wage jobs have gotten and how many regular jobs have been pushed closer and closer to min wage.
I work in food services and just yesterday a temp was fired for “stealing” leftovers that were going to be composted. Like excuse me? They could at least have gotten a warning since they were new not to mention its a cruel policy to begin with.
Our society will not improve until we punish this type of disgusting behavior. The people responsible for firing others for things like this must be held accountable.
hello - -
my name is joe - -
i have a wife - a dog
and a fam-il-ee
and i work - -
in a cookie factory
one day - - -
my boss came up to me he said
hey joe are ya busy i said no
he said do this - -
so i did - - -It absolutely sucks, but from a company perspective it’s not about greed, it’s about legal liability. If they provide food to a charity and someone gets sick from it, they are responsible for it. So the legal danger of giving away your “close to be expired” food is fraught with corporate danger.
Does it suck. Yes. Absolutely. But Joe opened them up to a potential lawsuit.
Indemnity agreement, done.
Everyone misses this point. Lawyers have turned into leeches of society sucking the empathy and fun out of everything so everyone is scared to get sued. On the flip side its so god damn easy for corporate lackeys to say ‘no cuz lawyers’ just to make their job incrementally easier rather than actually doing it. Its a shitty cycle and I’ve seen it too much in corporate America.
I wasn’t sure if this was the issue or if it was because the cookies technically needed to be expired first to donate?
Fucking Casey’s. Bad food, advertising on the pumps that can’t be muted, and now this. Good thing there’s alternatives where I live.
Casey’s.
I work for a cookie factory and i can give away as many cookies I want :D. As long as I don’t get the customers employees in trouble.
