Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/worker-ate-9200-worth-of-del.html
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3 Likes
Nibbling away over the eight years
Good line for a song.
23 Likes
When I worked at a deli/meat market in my late teens this was common place. We often snacked on an extra slice or two of various things.
28 Likes
Over 8 years I think that’s totally fair. Not even close to a dollar an hour to supplement what’s probably not much more than minimum wage. The store probably throws away more than that.
63 Likes
WTF? When you work with consumables, said consumables (to a reasonable degree) are a perk of the job. I take pens, pads of paper home from work, and print shit out on the printer here at work. As long as you don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, nobody cares. I worked as a short-order cook at a pub once and ate tons of shit. My boss reigned reined us in a couple times, but only when we were eating too much of the the top shelf stuff. This lady was eating HAM, the cheapest of the deli meats. $9,200 over 8 years is about $1000/year. Probably represents her giving herself a 3% raise in kind per year. Let the wage slave have her slices of meat.
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Business as usual is now theft when you really want a reason to fire someone.
23 Likes
If they stocked Jamon Iberico Bellota ham I could rack up a similar bill in a week.
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Ham is not the cheapest of meats. Bologna or various loads (pickle, polish, etc) are always cheapest. Hams can be inexpensive (Virginia baked ham) but also incredibly pricey (Parma prosciutto).
Agreed though as a whole. It’s part of the perks of the job.
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And? I’ve worked jobs in the food service industry and in coffee shops and this is fairly common. It probably says more about how shitty people are being paid that it’s universally common for workers to be supplementing their nutritional intake with food/drinks from work.
38 Likes
When I worked fast food in my high school years, we invented new items and ate for free all the time.
We weren’t technically supposed to; but yeah when there isn’t enough time to go elsewhere for lunch, you don’t have much money, and foods just sitting there… its what happens.
I’m sure the manager just wanted to fire them; I’m sure a person they liked would have got a talking too and nothing wrote up.
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She took it one piece at a time…
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…and it didn’t cost her a dime (just her job).
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Also, that’s like 75¢ a slice of ham. Ham may not be the cheapest, but that seems a little steep.
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I can’t imagine many places that serve food where this doesn’t happen. 8 years of service and canned over a few slices of ham per day. I’d wager that if their loss prevention officer tallied all of the loss to spoilage and expiry in that span it would dwarf this number.
20 Likes
Best food service place I ever worked gave everyone a free meal (except the steak) and a free drink at every shift as well as 50% with guests any time you’d come in off-shift. I left there 13 years ago and there are still some of the folks I worked with there.
I’d also regularly clear $300 on a 5 hour shift serving amazing tequila to people who cared. Good gig.
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It ain’t called salami slicing for nothing…
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So in 8 years no one said, hey ease up on the black forest ham, ma’am?
eight years, maybe 200 working days in a year… 1600 days at work… $5.75 worth of ham a day when at work… (is that $5.75 retail, so about $2 a day in cost? most places give their employees a discount on food from the store (a sandwich while you work? buy at cost). And how they KNOW she was eating it every day for eight years? hmmmmm… if she had been warned, repeatedly, ok fine, but this smacks of ‘need to know more’
Sometimes you slice meat and it doesn’t come out customer perfect… or it is the butt end/rind (delicious btw, just tougher) and is almost impossible to slice. So you supposed to throw that away? Hell no, you eat it and move on w work.
If this place sold top shelf Spanish hams I’d have a hard time NOT eating a few bucks worth every day! You should know your product. Heck when I was a teenager, I got a job at a tobacconist at 16? 17? I sold tobacco and cancer sticks without knowing what they were like. The owner started giving me nice cigars saying “you should know what good tobacco is like so you can sell the good/profitable stuff” rather than the Swisher Sweets (gag). We sold a preponderance of those awful candied ‘cigars’.
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I guess my frame of reference is the basic grocery store deli counter lunchmeats, where it’s: ham 4.99/lb, turkey 10.99/lb, chicken 11/99/lb, pastrami 12.99/lb. So yeah, out of my depth here with the specialty pork products. bologna sklipped my mind as it edges into the “meat” rather than meat categories 
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When I worked at McDonalds they were pretty strict about this. We still had one girl who only ever ate 3 chicken nuggets at a time, insuring that she stayed below the threshold where they would charge her for what she ate.
I used to sneak the biscuit ends from time to time myself. For people who have never worked with them, the hexagonal biscuits that McDonalds uses come in a big sheet exactly the right size to fit in a baking pan. Since they are hexagon shaped there are half biscuits on either end of the tray. We couldn’t sell them but they made for a nice mid-morning snack.
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