A downtown Seattle Starbucks employee was fired for taking an expired sandwich out of the trash and eating it .
Theft is theft, and no employee should be eating (or drinking) any items from the place they work without a receipt for the purchase.
Expired or not, in the trash or not, it wasn’t the employee’s, and it was theft. Could have been handled differently, but I’m sure others will be very happy to know that there’s a job opening now.
Correct. An employee that will steal a minor item will steal (and probably has stolen) other items as well.
In today’s litigious multi lawed society, the employee could probably sue Starbucks if he got sick from eating the sandwich he pulled out of the trash.
Exception, active sampling.
Easy enough to get the items as long as a bit gets out to the customers.
I disagree. If the sandwich cannot be sold because it’s expired, than it is no longer a retail item and the store can’t make money from it. The trash is fair game. Should be cleared first with the manager, however.
Our plant actually encourages employees to take home stuff which has been discarded . . . all that much less we have to pay the trash man to haul it away.
I know food is a different animal because safety may be involved, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Plus our plant uses common sense. If it is the typical discard trash, then no problem. But if it is borderline, like someone throwing out a repairable office chair, then we need to get a permission tag. I think most places operate with similar common sense rules.
"That is correct officer - the Perp was stealing our garbage before the garbage truck could cart it off to the landfill. Additionally, he did so without a proper receipt for purchase of said garbage."
A downtown Seattle Starbucks employee was fired for taking an expired sandwich out of the trash and eating it .
“Expired or not, in the trash or not, it wasn’t the employee’s, and it was theft.”
I represented a guy who was charged with Theft for taking scrap aluminum out of the trash at his employer’s place of business and scrapping it. The jury was out for less than five minutes before entering a verdict of NOT GUILTY, which under the law is absolutely and unqestionably the correct verdict.
An item in the trash is abandoned property, and the former owner no longer has any right to it whatsoever.
I suppose it depends where the trash is. If it was put outside, then it's public.
In any event, since the merchandise was no longer able to be sold and generate revenue, I hardly think it reasonable to characterize it as theft.
Doing so strikes me as similar to the idiotic "zero tolerance" policies in schools that cause kids to be suspended for chewing a poptart in the shape of a gun.
Better just to have employees sign a waiver of liability that if they eat discarded expired food and get sick, that they waive any liability claims against Starbucks.
Expired or not, in the trash or not, it wasn’t the employee’s, and it was theft.....Ummmm. Once you throw something out, it is no longer owned by anyone. I’ve gone through many trash/cans/dumpsters/ garbage dumps without a warrant when I was a cop. Once it hits the trash can you lose control of it. I was head of Fire/ Safety and Security for Philadelphia State Hospital at one time and we had a ‘client’ who went to the Krispy Kreme up the road at different times of the day. He dumpster dived for the donuts they threw out, brought them back and sold them to the geebers for a dime a piece. I actually had to investigate. The guy told me “I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid” He made $200 a month.
Couldn't one argue that, by instructing the employee to throw the item in the trash, the employer was relinquishing its ownership of the item?
On the other hand, if he ate the expired sandwich in a manner visible to customers, that's different.
I think it's in Deuteronomy that when you're harvesting, you're not allowed to go back and pick up the grapes that dropped from your wagon. Those are for the poor. I think this kind of rule by a company is silly and wrong. If something is trash, that means you didn't just drop it—you don't want it.
But of course Starbucks is free to act OCD and weird about all the wrong things, and I continue not to buy their coffee.
If its in the trash, its fair game, AS LONG AS HE GOT IT FROM THE TRASH AWAY FROM THE PREMISES.
The account isn’t clear about that bit.
Police search trash all the time looking for evidence. Long is it is on the curb, no problem.
Theft is theft, and no employee should be eating (or drinking) any items from the place they work without a receipt for the purchase.
Expired or not, in the trash or not, it wasn’t the employee’s, and it was theft. Could have been handled differently, but I’m sure others will be very happy to know that there’s a job opening now.
True, usually a reasonable store manager will take the expired food and hand it out at the end of the end of the shift as a reward for hard work, but like most things this requires common sense on the part of the store manager and not some store manager that is a complete sheep that follows a zero tolerance policy, this reminds me of the zero tolerance policy that suspends kids who brought a plastic knive intheir lunch because their parents packed it for them.
Some policies that seem screwy like this are meant to eliminate liability (thank you heartless lawyer bastards) because if an employee eats a near expired sandwich and getrs sick they could sue the employer, nevermind the fact the same sandwich could have been sold 10 minutes earlier and make a customer sick with no recourse....
Waste is waste. Starbucks should have found a way to sell at a reduced price to employees.
“However, Hutson added that a violation like this would not warrant a termination unless it was “the culmination of broader, ongoing performance issues.”
Duh!! How about you just tell the guy not to eat out of the trash and why and move on? He’s probably already barely scraping by on a crappy 30 hour per week job. I would say you have to be pretty hungry to pull semi expired food out of the trash and eat it.
My niece worked for Starbucks in Boston and she told me that they were allowed to eat the food that had not sold by the end of the day like sandwiches and scones etc.
Honestly the lack of Christian charity on this supposedly christian site baffles me. You sound like a bunch of nanny state converts.
Get a life!
Some 30 years ago a former airline stewardess was interviewed on “60 Minutes” for having done the exact same thing. She was fired. I don’t know which airline she worked for, but they dismissed her for taking discarded items from the trash.