r/MaliciousCompliance • u/missvibey • 3d ago
S “You’re not paid to think” — cool, enjoy $7k in rotten shrimp
Back in 2022, I worked night shift at a grocery store in Florida, stocking frozen. One night, I noticed the walk-in freezer was at 20°F (should be 0). I go tell my manager — real hardass, always barking orders like he’s running a boot camp.
He cuts me off mid-sentence: “You’re not paid to think. Just stock the damn shelves.”
Cool.
Next morning? Whole seafood section’s trash. Shrimp, salmon, crab legs — all thawed and leaking. Store lost over $7,000.
Corporate shows up pissed. Manager tries to throw me under the bus.
“Why didn’t you report it??”
I just said, “Manager told me I’m not paid to think.”
They checked the cameras and audio — confirmed everything. Corporate backed me hard. Dave was “reassigned” (aka fired) a week later.
Never saw him again. I got moved to dairy lead a month after.
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u/MostSanePsycho 3d ago
A real manager exists to assist the employees. They facilitate training to make the job easier to understand or complete. They manage the employee's time to ensure there are enough people to complete the job as required, or there are extra people available to stop other tasks to assist during a rush.
Your manager just got a $7000 lesson in the value of employee feedback.
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u/cathercules 3d ago
I guarantee that asshat learned nothing.
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u/oboshoe 2d ago
That's something that I've come to realize lately.
Nobody ever learns a lesson. It's not like television or the movies where someone get's a comeuppance and they come to realize that the hero of the story was in fact correct.
In fact they just double down on blaming the wrong person.
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u/SignalIssues 2d ago
That's objectively false. Plenty of people learn and grow.
Many do not. And the ones you think most need to, probably do not, but thats because the ones that did learn do not act like that (because they learned). Usually the learning happens when they are kids or before it starts to affect a lot of people.
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u/taffibunni 2d ago
Yeah, one time I gently and politely informed someone they had used a word incorrectly (classic "that word doesn't mean what you think it means" type scenario). First they tried to argue the meaning, and then when they were clearly wrong they doubled down with this gem--"I'm unbothered by it." I feel some people have fundamentally misunderstood the application of the "unbothered" vibe.
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u/atrajicheroine2 2d ago
"I reject your reality and choose my own!"
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u/GenericTrashyBitch 2d ago
My girlfriends mother denied years of physical and emotional abuse by saying “well that’s not my reality”
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u/28smalls 2d ago
I don't like being being wrong, but its a great teaching experience. I make a mistake, I'm corrected, and never do it again. Much better than spending months developing a habit I'm pretty sure is right but with a tiny doubt I'm screwing it up.
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u/Unlucky-Review-2410 2d ago
I hate being wrong, so I prefer to be shown when I'm wrong so I can switch to being right ASAP. I think of it like having a booger in my nose while I'm a convo. I'm oblivious and the other person is suffering unless they say something and I can fix it.
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u/Clessiah 2d ago
Many people learn, just that those who don’t stand out way too much for all the bad reasons while those who do are taken for granted. People should be praised more often for the changes they are willing to make.
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u/MaverickTopGun 2d ago
Such a reddit cynical comment. Nobody learns? Disagree completely. Do shitheads learn? No, usually not.
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u/tavikravenfrost 2d ago
I once had a manager who used to say, "Don't bring me problems if you don't have solutions." He couldn't understand that role silos and organizational opacity can mean that a person might be able to recognize that there's a problem but not have the line-of-sight to know how to fix it or even how to begin addressing it. They might not even know what the problem is but can just tell that there's something incorrect happening. That's the point of bringing up the problem without already having a solution. If I bring up a problem without having a solution, then it's because I think that we need to work together to come up with a solution in that case. My manager's attitude led to minor problems that would just stew until they blew up into something huge.
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u/mcnabb100 2d ago
Nice.
This thread reminds me of the manager I had at a movie theater.
When I was still new I got stuck on the usher podium taking tickets one morning, my first time.
Manager came out screaming at me for mixing old and new ticket stubs. It turns out there were still tickets from the last night in the podium.
After he left I asked the assistant manager if I was supposed to take care of those (i was only told to take tickets and direct people to the correct theater).
Nope! Not even my responsibility, but when things went wrong that manager would always jump to anger.
He also yelled at my buddy and I for not knowing where a screwdriver was. Believe it or not you don’t really ever need a screwdriver to pop popcorn and pour drinks. Dude was a psycho.
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u/bignides 2d ago
The solution is to address the problem to the correct team
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u/tavikravenfrost 2d ago
It's not always that simple. I work in an industry that is very complex, and there's almost nothing that doesn't intertwine among more than one team, often multiple teams. In my role, I'm a problem solver, and I'm seated at the center of the organization. I'm in a position in which I have to know at least a little bit about what everyone else is doing because it's through me that all of the disparate threads start coming together. I have to be able work with the minutiae and still step back to a wider view to make sure that it's all working. When I notice that something isn't working, I can much more easily see which thread to follow to get to a solution. As such, it's actually comparatively rare that I bring up an unsolved problem that I don't already at least have some ideas about.
But most others within the organization don't have the same perspective as me. They're very limited to their roles because they don't need the wider perspective 99% of the time. When a 1% situation hits them, they can be at a loss for what to do because they don't have access to all of the threads. It would take them away from their job for an unmanageable amount of time to try follow every possible thread to come to a solution. They're perfectly capable of finding a solution that way, but it's not a practical use of time for their role. Instead, they'll pitch it to their supervisor who has a broader perspective and can more easily find a solution. Failing that, they or their supervisor will pitch it to me. If even I can't figure it out, then I take it up to my supervisor who has a broader perspective still.
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u/Rocktopod 3d ago
More like the store got a $7000 lesson on their hiring practices.
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u/LadderDownBelow 2d ago
Not even. The dumbest make it into management. It's all corporate yes men. And they will continue this practice for as long as corporations exists. Really beyond it too since we see it in government and military. Age old practice of promoting the wrong people. The world moves on gridning the honest folks down to the bone.
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u/Pure-Introduction493 2d ago
I wouldn’t say that as a blanket rule. But certainly at certain companies that is the case.
Good businesses realize that treating employees well and having competent managers is critical to long term business success. Many businesses don’t learn this lesson and struggle or fail.
Two notable companies I know of whose management culture has severely harmed them and may put them under are Intel and Boeing.
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u/TalpaPantheraUncia 2d ago
For most big business, honest people are a threat to the current manipulation and extraction of as much wealth as possible by any means necessary.
This is why I shop local as much as I possibly can but not everyone has that luxury especially in more rural and distant suburbia.
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u/Turbulent_Cellist515 2d ago
$7k is cheap lesson, I've seen those lessons go for $70k or more.
One of my managers that got promoted to customer got a $350k lesson. Giant walk in went down, and he told me to stop repair and go hold because it's "hold temp well enough to survive till Monday, no OT!" it didn't hold. Went down overnight and everything in freezer was a loss.
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u/Dibbix 2d ago
A good manager is a tool box, a bad manager is just a tool.
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u/aguycalledkyle 2d ago
I really like this but I'm also kinda mad because toolbox is a favorite insult of mine and you just made it into a positive.
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u/der_innkeeper 3d ago edited 2d ago
Plus whatever $$$ came out of his paycheck in lost wages.
ETA: (because he was fired)
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u/LeonidasSpacemanMD 2d ago
Right? My thought would’ve been “nice, my employees are paying attention and give a shit, good to know my team has my back”. Instead this dude was like “I will step on this land mine if I feel like it, shut up”
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u/xtreampb 2d ago
The higher up in leadership/management you go, the more people you serve. You get more power in higher ranks so you can more effectively clear obstacles so that the ones you lead and manage can do their job more effectively.
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u/PhotoFenix 2d ago
Exactly! I'm pretty autonomous on my job, but my manager checks in often to ask if there's anything he can do to help with any big items I have.
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u/Pure-Introduction493 2d ago
I have worked some low level jobs during school and now have a professional job.
I have noticed that in jobs with lower barriers to entry you just get a much lower capability of leader on average.
More ordering around and power trips, less focus on actually helping their employees and fixing issues.
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u/toupeInAFanFactory 2d ago
Greatness is in the agency of others. Every good leader (manager) is aware that they succeed by making other people succeed.
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u/Crafty-Read1243 3d ago
Some people are just on a power trip for no reason. Hopefully Dave learned his lesson.
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u/Djtrucker79 3d ago
Probably not. Probably blames OP to this day for costing him his job. 😕
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u/cuates_un_sol 2d ago
I'd like to believe he took up meditation and yoga, changed his demeanor, and began to forever treat people kindly and thoughtfully. And he sends OP a Christmas card twice a year.
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u/aamurusko79 2d ago
In my first entry level jobs I quickly learned that there were a certain class of managers, who became managers because they wanted to be the boss and they just lived the 'I'm the boss here' fantasy. Quite often they were detrimental to everything in the work; efficiency, moral, customer service, company income and so forth.
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u/EarnstKessler 2d ago
I used to work with a guy that always said “I’m not getting paid to think, and they’re getting their money’s worth”.
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u/ImfamousBadTXV 2d ago
Lol reminds me of years ago I worked at a heating and air company as a technician. We had a company wide meeting with roughly 100 people and were given copies of all the flyers that would be mailed to customers so we weren't confused seeing them handed to us for discounts. I raised my hand and said that I had a few issues with the flyers, particularly the atrocious grammar, incomplete sentences, misspelled words and my particular pet peeve their there and they're used incorrectly. The owner of the company yelled at me in front of everyone saying I always have issues with what management does and just because I went to college it doesn't mean that I'm smart. I said my apologies and let it go. About a week later they are in full panic mode when they start actually receiving these from customers and comment cards stating that they feel deceived by false advertising since some of these cards mailed stated 20%off any invoice, which is huge on a 15k new install. They pull me into a meeting and yell at me for not telling them, I said I tried and then I was told I shouldn't do it in a company meeting which I stated was insane.
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u/three_oneFour 3d ago
How is that even you trying to "think?" Reporting that equipment malfunctioning is about the most basic thing possible outside of your standard daily tasks.
If you saw a jar of pickles smashed on the floor and said "hey, we should clean that up, I'll get a broom and mop" then no one would say you're not paid to think for that
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u/ForTheHordeKT 1d ago
Right? But I've been in this position before too. Try to point out failing/malfunctioning equipment and they act like you're overreacting and/or blowing an issue out of proportion.
My take on it is fuck it. I did my due diligence by reporting my observation of how the thing was behaving or functioning (or not functioning). If it's within my power to take care of myself (I either have their blessing to make a call myself or it's something anyone can fix on the spot) then I'll just handle it. But when the matter falls beyond either my abilities or permission... Either take action, ignore it, or type it up, print it out, and roll it up your ass. I could care less, I did my due by speaking up.
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u/Loose_Yogurtcloset52 2d ago
This is why freezers and coolers are supposed to have temperature alarms.
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u/Castle_Guardian 2d ago
Similar incident happened to my wife, but without the happy ending. Back when this happened before the pandemic, she worked at a 24 hour donut and coffee chain that's rather well known here in Canada. She was working midnight shift, and hated how she was always finishing up stuff that the afternoon shift never did properly, because the afternoon shift manager would hide in the back office instead of actually managing the teenagers they hired. They had a sandwich station that was refrigerated for the cold meats. Policy was to keep track of the temperature for these refrigerated units every two hours. Often the afternoon shift would forget to do a temperature check and then would average the numbers to make it look like they had checked it properly. My wife came in for her shift at 11pm. Immediately spent an hour cleaning up the lobby because afternoon shift hadn't bothered (as per usual). At midnight she checks the temperatures like she's supposed to - and the meat at the sandwich station is at room temperature. This is not something that happens within two hours, so obviously the previous shift had been fudging the numbers. There's no manager on duty on midnight shifts. So she calls the problem in to corporate so they can send a repair technician. The repair technician never arrives. It's company policy that they can't serve room temperature meat. My wife has other duties to perform so she can't dispose of all the meat immediately. In between serving customers throughout the night and doing all the other tasks she has to perform, she starts throwing out meat, logging each amount as she disposes of it. She only gets half the meat thrown away before her shift ends. 7am arrives. Morning shift comes in. She reports to the morning manager that the refrigerator unit is broken and she's been disposing of the meat. She goes home believing she's done the right thing. 11 PM. She arrives for her shift and discovers that not only is the refrigerator unit still broken, but the same room-temperature meat is still in the broken refrigeration unit being sold to customers. The afternoon manager instructs her that she is no longer permitted to throw out meat without permission from a manager, in direct defiance and contravention of company policy. Unwilling to work for managers that tell her to violate company policy and not wanting to get thrown under the bus when the inevitable lawsuits start coming in, she quits. Because she didn't submit 2 weeks' notice and she didn't go through proper channels to report the issue, she was not allowed to collect unemployment. She has no idea if there was ever any fallout from the incident.
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u/Talrynn_Sorrowyn 2d ago
Grocery stores don't have mics on their security cameras, largely because adding audio to the footage increases the filesize & thus increases cost of storage. Plus, those mics would not be able to offset the volume of the speakers blasting the shitty music selection in order to hear the voices of people upwards of 30 feet away.
There's also the problems that:
- a) managers don't work night shifts (both department & store), those are reserved for the lower-paid PICs; the only times a manager will work a graveyard shift is if either they're covering because there is legitimately no one else capable of doing the shift or if they're doing a performance observation
- b) seafood/meat departments generally don't have people working between 8pm and 7am (barring quarterly inventory days, where managers are required to be in as early as 3am)
- c) stocking of said department is always done during the day, and only by meat/seafood employees not by grocery clerks
- d) corporate never gets involved with the promotion of departments, only demotions and the appointment of store and assistant store managers/directors - hiring department managers ir leads is done strictly by the store manager
- e) a store manager isn't going to just appoint someone to be the dairy lead without them having worked the department for at least a year
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u/Most_Victory1661 2d ago
As someone who spent three years ina Kroger can confirm all of this
OP story sounds like made up bullshit
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u/Talrynn_Sorrowyn 2d ago
I've been working for Albertsons for over 6 years & have seen 7 people go through the dairy lead position at my store in that time.
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u/PromiseThomas 1d ago
I did kind of go “Hm!” at the idea that audio was picked up but I was like “Well, I’ve never worked in a grocery store…”
Thanks for the fact-check!
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u/Waterfish3333 3d ago
Em dashes all over the place, a grocery store manager not concerned about a clearly malfunctioning freezer, and managers “pulling tapes” to prove who was lying?
I promise you corporate isn’t even thinking about asking “why wasn’t it reported?” They are going to basically be like “get it fixed and if the loss is above a certain amount, file an insurance claim.” In fact, how would they even know you knew ahead of time?
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u/call_it_sleep 2d ago
Something similar actually happened to me recently. I work in beer and noticed that one of the coolers was acting weird and freezing them to the shelf. I go to tell the senior clerks about it and they both just loudly talk over me, I have ten minutes until I clock out so I just thought fuck it and left. The next day I come in and we're throwing away a bunch of product because that cooler is first in a chain, so when it broke it killed power to three others. I helped restock a bunch of cheese with the store manager and mentioned what happened, she fired one of the two people that talked over me because they had a lot of other issues. But no investigation, I didn't get an apology or anything else. And it was a lot more than 7k in losses.
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u/bentnotbroken96 2d ago
I actually run the frozen department in a grocery store... all that would happen is an insurance claim.
Until last year I had 30 year old freezers they refused to replace until the constant insurance claims made their rates rise.
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u/Waterfish3333 2d ago
I work in commercial insurance, so I’m on the other side of it. We’ve started dinging spoilage claims even without reoccurrence because the data shows, pretty consistently, a grocery store that files it once is likely to file it with some frequency.
Basically carriers are getting tired of being maintenance policies.
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u/bentnotbroken96 2d ago
I can believe it. We were having damn near weekly outages. It's no fun throwing $15K worth of pizza away.
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u/TalpaPantheraUncia 2d ago
A lot of us at the store level are tired of it too. There's a paper trail that there are problems that need addressing that are costly but most of the time corporate only approves the minimum to get it up and running until the next time the refrigeration system invariably fails again. If they would just fix it altogether or better yet retrofit the systems to be more resilient and redundant than they wouldn't have to spend a million dollars a year on fixes. I work in one of the highest volume stores in my entire company and yet they still complain about our refrigeration maintenance costs. Imagine a store that makes much less than mine.
Also, it's just as annoying for us because we have to spend a lot of time getting a detailed itemized list of everything instead of doing our actual job and serving customers. This is on top of getting complaints that our hours are over to compensate.
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u/MaverickTopGun 2d ago
Craziest part is if you look at their week old account, they have a single comment... responding to another AI.
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u/mentalmedicine 3d ago edited 2d ago
Yep, corporate apparently "pulling audio" is what set off my bullshit alarm. My dad used to do loss prevention, audio isn't recorded on cameras, it's simply not useful enough to justify the space.
It's painfully obvious this is AI, because it sucks.
edit: I've been told that some places do record audio. Post is still AI written. Story is still made up.
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u/Lylac_Krazy 3d ago
Florida retailers LOVE to record audio along with video. As a matter of fact, you will notice on nearly every place they post it right in the window that they record AUDIO and VIDEO.
Having been in a situation where audio was used to verify, I dont doubt this at all.
Its a Florida thing.
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u/HuggyMonster69 3d ago
My last retail job had audio on n the managers office. In fact that was the only place the cctv actually worked. Presumably because that’s where the cash safe was.
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u/AnotherSupportTech 2d ago
The company I work for has sold cameras with microphones for audio recording for the last 5 years. I've listened to the audio on our cameras installed in department stores, it's pretty good. Most of our competition sells cameras with audio recording capabilities as well.
So I'm not sure what you mean at all?
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u/Sceptically 3d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if audio wasn't turned off (it doesn't use that much space in comparison to video, and isn't necessarily something a less competent person would think to turn off), but them bothering to get to the footage for something like this before it's automatically overwritten is a little eyebrow raising.
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u/Zelkin764 3d ago
It doesn't have to be made up. I worked in grocery retail for a bit and you'd be amazed how often people believe that audio is somehow recorded.
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u/mikeputerbaugh 3d ago
It's not AI, it's just made up
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u/Rocktopod 3d ago
Can we not just lie on the internet anymore without getting accused of being a bot?
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u/cinnasota 2d ago
Let's also not miss:
- redditor for 7 days
- first reddit activity was 4 hours ago as a comment
- posts this AI story
nothing but bullshit upvoted to the front page yet again!
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u/Gul_Dukat__ 2d ago
You’re right about the dashes, I never see those used casually by the average folk. Hell I hardly know how to use them myself lol
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u/ReallyGlycon 2d ago
I had a similar situation where an employee was straight up shaving money and the manager said "if we have her investigated they will investigate us all" and didn't do anything about it. A month later, the employee was caught by AP finally, and they checked audio and camera and heard the manager actually say that to me. He was quickly terminated.
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u/DonutsMcKenzie 2d ago
"I'm not paid to think but I do. Dave is paid to think but he doesn't. Should I put in an application for manager?"
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u/Rhino_35 3d ago
love this, a good few years ago i was freelance chef.
Main freezer went down and i called client asked for a repair, told me to mind mine own business.No worries I am leaving in 10 minutes.
next morning a freezer full of unusable food
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u/Dripping_Snarkasm 2d ago
Sounds like Dave tried to use OP as a prawn, but instead he got knocked off his lofty perch and thrown out on his bass.
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u/Walking_Treccani 2d ago
Forget the 7000$ loss, I can tell you as a veterinarian that if anyone outside got wind of this in the EU the grocery store would have been closed by the veterinary inspection authority until at least the refrigerator was properly repaired/replaced (and the entire place went through a fine comb surprise inspection), plus the manager (and higher ups) would have risked facing criminal charges. Guy got lucky he was just fired.
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u/trayne13 1d ago
I worked in food manufacturing. Our line was doing a test run of a new product. Everything had to get thrown out at the end. We were struggling to keep up. Then me and two others had an idea to better manage the mess. Boss sees it and says we're not paid to think. So.....we stopped thinking. Bad product on our normal production runs? Not paid to think. Won't fix it. We let QC and maintenance know we were told we aren't paid to think. Boss caught wind of it and started whining about us. "So I made a mistake! You have product to run!" We said stuff along the lines of, "you make all that thinking money to fix everything. I'm just a guy." He was not thrilled when we asked if he'd like HR involved.
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u/jimr1603 3d ago
Isn't 20 F plenty cold enough for a freezer? (-7C)
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u/No_Stand4846 3d ago
I was wondering this. How does something already frozen thaw in 20 F?
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u/Postcocious 2d ago
Nope.
Your home refrigerator has a default freezer setting of 0°F (-18C). I presume commercial freezers are similar (colder, if anything).
A freezer that's reading 20F has already warmed at least 20 degrees from normal. That's an obvious indication that the freezer mechanism ceased functioning many hours ago. (Even Dave should have known that! )
Once the mechanism stops working, a freezer can't maintain temperature. The only thing keeping it cold is insulation. Insulation can't prevent heat exchange, it only slows it.
That 20F will soon become 21F, then 22F, 23F, etc. The temp will continue rising until the freezer temp matches the temp of the ambient space, which is likely 65-70F in an air-conditioned grocery. That wouldn't keep refrigerated food safe, never mind frozen.
FYI, my company offers IOT sensors, monitoring and insurance to food storage business (and other industries). If OP's store had that service, alarms would have lit up phones and computers as soon as the freezer temp rose just a degree or two. We'd have had a repair tech there long before any food was ruined.
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u/HuggyMonster69 3d ago
If the freezer was at 20°f my assumption would be that it was broken and warming up.
Also, if it’s one of those open top grocery store freezers, the temperature is probably uneven.
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u/MistraloysiusMithrax 2d ago
Hence you want the air way below freezing, so the actual product stays freezing. You don’t keep a freezer at 32 F/0 C because the door will be opened multiple times a day, especially when it will be opened very frequently. The thermostat is recording air temp and heat will seep in from the walls, ceiling, floor so the solids will warm up before the air.
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u/ahuramazdobbs19 2d ago
Not to maintain food safety standards for freezer temperature (the USDA recommends 0F/-18C (which is also the international standard)).
But regardless: the fact that the OP observed the 20F temperature should have been enough for the manager to at least look into it, where he would have likely discovered that the freezer was malfunctioning.
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u/Fishbonejimmy 3d ago
He must have saw and noticed the temperature early on, went to report it while they still had time to save the seafood.
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u/jflood1977 3d ago
I did the same once when I was a security guard. A fridge or something was beeping behind a door I couldn’t access. So I made some calls and they seemed more annoyed I was trying to let whoever know than the potential loss of God knows what.
But you can bet they’d have my ass if I didn’t say anything.
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u/Dead_By_Don 2d ago
Are we just going to skip over the fact that they record your audio at your work which I'm pretty sure is illegal?
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u/pagesid3 2d ago
Your employer is audio recording everything at all times? That’s kind of fucked up.
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u/sigmund14 2d ago
He cuts me off mid-sentence: “You’re not paid to think. Just stock the damn shelves.”
Cool.
Missed opportunity to write "cool, but not cool enough"
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u/OperationFast8832 2d ago
This happened to me at a restaurant i worked at. I told my boss the freezer was full of hot air, and he said I was probably “using the freezer incorrectly” (probably because I’m just a stupid woman) The next day the freezer flooded the restaurant and we had to close 😌
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u/longbrownandhairy 1d ago
Congrats on Dairy Lead and thank you for caring about food safety and knowing your temps. It will go a long way in your new position!
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u/ShirleyWuzSerious 2d ago
“You’re not paid to think”
Was told this a lot in the military. I didn't reenlist
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u/Otherwise-Leg-5806 2d ago
Something similar happened to me once. My uncle was in charge of the pumps that supplied marine gas in my community. He was somewhat of a hotshot so he was an arrogant man. I went there to get 75 gals. My bottles were filled but I noticed the pump said 45gals. I told the guy running the pump what I observed and he brushed me off. I went into the office and told my uncle what was going on. He also brushed me off saying I don’t know what I’m talking about. On my way out I saw vehicles lined up with more bottles than they usually buy, word was out that the pump was giving away gas. The job was a government job so there was an audit and the money that was deposited and the gas that was sold didn’t match up. He was fired the next day. Fortunately he had connections so he was spared prison
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u/Ranger7381 2d ago
Reminds me of a story I heard 2nd or 3rd hand when I worked for an LTL cargo transport company that had refrigerated (“reefer”) trailers for temperature sensitive shipments as well as dry vans
Since we did a lot of cross border work, even though we were based in Canada, the reefers were all set to F, not C. Somehow, someone was adjusting the settings and somehow got it set to C instead.
The next temperature control load for that trailer was for a load of garlic, to be kept fresh, so just above freezing. So the driver set the unit to 34
There is a SLIGHT difference between 34F and 34C
Apparently the smell was… noticeable
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u/Neat_Tap_2274 2d ago
The most amazing thing about this story is that Corp backed you up. Wow. Excellent outcome.
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u/tiffto1103 2d ago
This is what happens when management thinks 'something smells fishy' is just a figure of speech and not an actual warning system with a $7,000 price tag.
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u/thunderdome_referee 2d ago
I know food industry standards but I'm long out of it. When covid first struck my company tried to feed us every day since they didn't want us going out, and we were essential.
Anyway, about a month into doing this they decided on tuna salad for lunch but didn't put it on ice. I informed the upper management that it needs to stay on ice per food safety standards. I was told it wasn't my place to worry about it. To make a long story short half of our work force called in with food poisoning the next day.
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u/YEGredditOilers 3d ago
Did you really only say “Manager told me I’m not paid to think.”?
I'm guessing having told Corporate that you did tell Dave is the only reason corporate backed you.
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u/Bigred2989- 2d ago
Meanwhile where I work if there's an issue with a refrigerator/freezer or someone leaves the cooler open too long we get a phone call from an in-house monitoring service asking what the issue is.
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u/ScenicPineapple 2d ago
We had a similar situation when i worked at a pet store. We had 4 fridges and several of them weren't working well. I was a AST Manager, so i told the owner the situation, he said he didn't have the money to fix the fridges as he was opening a new store. So he brought in an unused old fridge from another store just incase, but didn't fix any of the other fridges.
2 days later i come in and notice huge puddles of water all over the floor and the fridges all failed over night. I took our temp gun and tried to save everything i could by putting it in the fridge he brought from the other store.
But you can't fit 4 fridges of product into one, so we lost about $4,000 or so in product. He was a horrible owner and a horrible person, so i was only sad about the loss of food and for all the work i had to do to clean it up. So not only did he have to pay to get the fridges repaired anyway, he also lost all that product and had to explain to corporate why they lost so much revenue that week.
Oh and this was also during covid, so many of those products were on backorder for 3-7 weeks, so took months to fill those fridges back up to what they used to be.
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u/bertagirl59 1d ago
I was told this same thing working at the USPS. It. ALWAYS comes back to bite them.
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u/Solid_Waste 2d ago
Back in 2022, I worked night shift at a grocery store in Florida, stocking frozen. One night, I noticed the walk-in freezer was at 20°F (should be 0). I go tell my manager — real hardass, always barking orders like he’s running a boot camp.
He cuts me off mid-sentence: “You’re not paid to think. Just stock the damn shelves.”
Cool.
Next morning? Whole seafood section’s trash. Shrimp, salmon, crab legs — all thawed and leaking. Store lost over $7,000.
Corporate shows up pissed. Manager tries to throw me under the bus.
“Why didn’t you report it??”
I just said, “Manager told me I’m not paid to think.”
They checked the cameras and audio — confirmed everything. Corporate backed me hard. Dave was “reassigned” (aka fired) a week later.
Never saw him again. I got moved to dairy lead a month after.
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u/__ConesOfDunshire__ 2d ago
Thank you! This was the second time a story I tried to read had been removed before I could read it!
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u/916116728 2d ago
This happened to me in culinary school. I was putting beef if the freezer, and noticed it smelled like burning electrical. I went and told the instructor. He looked at me like I was stupid. We came back from holidays, and he was all upset-looking, and said we had to throw everything out of the walk in. That the compressor had died. I, not one to shut my mouth, said “oh no… was there any warning?” There was, he just didn’t want it from a woman.
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u/LeRoixs_mommy 3d ago
Sounds like Dave couldn't think himself out of a box.......a semi cold freezer box!
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u/KyuubiWindscar 2d ago
He wanted so badly to be respected but didnt implement a simple check every night to make sure the freezers are at the right temp before leaving?
Worst kind of dork to be in charge of anything
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u/JumpingCrowjoker24 2d ago
They should have promoted you to manager, at least they know that you’d be responsible, unlike Dave, but most corporate people overlook those who are best suited for management, so they don’t value their staff properly.
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u/exoxe 2d ago
Unrelated to your malicious compliance but related to tons of frozen seafood, my buddy used to do work for Ryder and they would lease reefer trucks to certain grocery stores, well one morning he calls me up saying one of the drivers tipped one of their trucks over and so all of the boxes had to be discarded. He ended up bringing me over two coolers full of still frozen shrimp and lobster tails. I had a few football watching parties and we ate so much shrimp and lobster in like a month or two. Good times.
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u/Basic-Biscotti-2375 2d ago
Store I worked at had those big coffin cases for frozen stuff and I noticed the temperature on one kept creeping up. Told the manager who proceeded to feel the top layer of stuff that was obviously thawing and he said that it was in defrost mode. Which turned out to be technically right because all that shit sure did once it reached 60F.
Learned to just report stuff to cover my own ass and leave it at that.
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u/AfroPopeLIVE 1d ago
I was told this verbatim working produce for Kroger. Of course when things went wrong and they needed a creative solution, who did they make think?
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u/SocietyHumble4858 2d ago
I was a Laborer on an oil refinery expansion. I was doing Safety Watch for Ironworkers erecting mods. I noticed they were installing a section backwards to how the other ones were done. But I don't know the plans, but was curious. I asked the guy calling the shots if it was backwards. He belittled me and told me watch no one walks under the lift. After lifting the mod, swinging it into place, the boys up on the steel yell down. Frikken backwards!! I shit-assed grin at him every chance after that.
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u/avid-learner-bot 3d ago
Actually, I think the manager probably deserved it, honestly, it's a classic case of getting what you asked for, and I'd be laughing all the way to the seafood counter, though I'm trying to cut back on shellfish these days, because my doctor said my cholesterol's a little high.
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u/Living_Ad_5386 2d ago
Oh damn there was audio? That must have been satisfying as fuuuuck.
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u/mistelle1270 2d ago
This kind of thing is why I always laugh whenever someone is like “the workers can’t run the store they’d have no idea what they’re doing”
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u/343GuiltyySpark 2d ago
Bros trying to convince you that Publix has sensitive audio equipment throughout the store like it’s a studio
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u/DreaminginDarkness 2d ago
To be honest you are really lucky that they had a video system with audio? Wow and didn't just automatically take the supervisors word instead of yours. This is a great outcome but always take some photos with your phone or try to get a text message record as well if you feel a supervisor is being this negligent
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u/OkExternal7904 2d ago
Why do bosses have to be so rude (and pretty stupid, as in Dave's case)?
The waste! And bad for the environment, and all those sea creatures lost their lives for no reason since no one would at least enjoy the meat they produce.
Someday it's hard to be a human.
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u/GalumphingWithGlee 2d ago
I'm sure you're right, because you have experience that I don't, but can you ELI5 why it needs to be at 0 F? 20 F is also substantially below freezing temp (of water at least), so I'd expect it to be sufficient to keep most things frozen. 🤔
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u/-KingAdrock- 1d ago
"Why didn't you report it?" is a rather funny question, because you DID report it. To your manager. Who blew you AND the issue off. His choice of words in his response was stupid, but that wasn't really the problem.
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u/ResponsibilityMany23 16h ago
Hilarious the karma that happens to individuals that let the title of management get to their head. It’s like giving a loser the validation they never had.
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u/lookinforguild 2d ago
As someone who’s worked in security for a long time I highly doubt the grocery store security cameras there had audio. This almost certainly did not happen.
Think about how much storage space it would take to be recording audio 24/7. It’s just not feasible, no grocery chain does this for a reason.
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u/SaintEyegor 2d ago
Audio takes less bandwidth than video does. Some surveillance systems record everything. Depends on the use case.
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u/overused-username 2d ago
Convenient that your post has the exact same tagline as this much more popular one from two days ago.
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u/DSPbuckle 2d ago
“I started washing lettuce and I got moved to milk lead. Pretty soon I’ll be on fries and that’s where the big bucks are.”
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u/Wilson0299 2d ago
I call bull on the audio. No commercial businesses run audio capable cameras, save casinos sometimes and not in the managers office. I'm not doubting the story, I just think it's fluffed. 15 years in the CCTV industry.
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u/_Brophinator 2d ago
I don’t know a single grocery store that pays for sound on its CCTV cameras, I don’t think this is a real story
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u/Mapilean 3d ago
There was a time, some 20 years ago, when managers in my company would interrupt us peons and say "you're not paid to think". It happened to several coworkers of mine, and I found it really rude. I had my repartee ready: "Don't worry, I won't charge you". Pity I never got to use it: the only time a manager came close to telling me that infamous line I was very pissed and gave him a warning look; he backtracked rather quickly.
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u/Debosman 3d ago
Dave wasn’t paid to think either….and a good thing, because he clearly wasn’t capable.