we all know capitalism is fucking evil but one of my favorite stories to tell from Retail Hell is that time my district manager got annoyed that 2 poor people were taking food out of the dumpster occasionally so he told us all to start pouring bleach over all the items we threw out so people couldn’t use them/it would hurt them if they touched it directly. never did that and absolutely have participated in “employee theft” by stealing bags of food from the dumpsters to donate to the local food bank but like. he really did just want us to directly harm people over food that was already in the literal trash.
when managers and CEOs get up in arms about “employee theft” they’re actually talking about people like me who don’t throw out the 30 pairs of shoes that we weren’t able to sell and instead bag them up and throw them behind the dumpster for retrieval/donation later. I once took home $450 of food and another night got $500 worth of makeup. Perfectly good electronics get thrown away bc the packaging was tampered with. We throw away food, cosmetics, and household products 30-60 days before their expiration dates (which are also kinda bullshit anyway). The whole retail model is structured around this idea of massive waste.
The worst part about this is that you can legally be fired for this. Starbucks did this to an old floor manager of mine years ago. Whenever we’d collect all the food that had to be tossed away, she’d divide it amongst those of us that she knew didn’t have a lot of money and needed the extra food. It was going to be dumped anyway, but because she chose to give the food out instead of placing it in a trash bag, she was fired. The rest of us were given a warning not to do the same. Capitalism is a joke.
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Marshmellowmilktea 