So track how many cookies you sell and TELL employees how many to make. That way you won't be a business who both openly distrusts their employees and wastes food.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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The owners didn't actually care. It was just a way to exert power over people.
Probably not really. Their reasons are likely to be exactly what they stated, a weak attempt to keep costs down. They're not cackling villains twirling their mustaches in glee at the power they hold over their peons, they're just greedy. They want the red number on the spreadsheet to be smaller, they don't care how much misery it causes. When it comes down to it, the behaviors of the owner-class can just about ALWAYS be explained, and predicted, by the simple measure of "What makes more profit."
But believing your employees to be lying thieves who would bake extra cookies to take home is the problem. You can be concerned about profits while also respecting employees.
Having worked at a McDick's franchise in the past, my experience was that profit was the excuse. The owner wanted to feel like an aristocrat, showing up in their Bugatti and making proclamations without caring about how they meshed with reality (ex. fewer employees per shift will cause more waste because of the need to pre-cook more to keep up with rush demand).
Such good Christians.
It's mind-boggling. American Evangelical Christians could hardly be farther from the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. They're more like anti-Christians.
Edit: and thank you for making the connection that the Chick-Fil-A organization was founded and run by self-avowed "Christians" who are rabidly anti-LGBTQ.
This clearly isn't working because why are there 55 extra cookies
Clearly the manager either isn't involving themselves with projecting food production needs, or is very bad at it. Either way, this is on the manager if there is so much waste. How the hell do you do other food management like ordering and inventory if you're just letting people make whatever they feel is the right amount? Do your job. This kills the idea that employees will make too much in order to take something home, and lets you let them take extra home. Win-win for everyone. And if taking a few cookies home kills your business, once again you're a bad food manager.
Daily reminder that food waste is necessary to make sure there will be enough when there is a bad harvest. Like when climate change massively reduces crop yields, or a forest fire burns down your food forest.
To some extent this can be mitigated with preserves, but preserves don't last forever and also cost labor and resources to prepare and recycle. Sometimes harvests are better than expected 10 years in a row. Sometimes they're catastrophically worse 10 years in a row. Sometimes you suddenly need to feed more people, sometimes you suddenly have better things to do than prevent food waste. You fundamentally can't prevent waste without risking shortage.
Capitalism is bad, especially when its mask slips and profit opportunities are wasted to hurt people to enforce the hierarchy that capitalism actually cares about. But please make sure you have plenty of food to waste whenever you try to set something up on your own.
That is such a weak hypothesis, backed by what?
Food sovereignty and food security are much more detailed and nuanced than this, but yeah this illusion of shameless abundance has been the operating principle for many decades, justified by industrial production methods at grand scale.
We now know, or rather have remembered, that diversity in production is the secret. The andean civilizations cultivated thousands of varieties of potato before colonization, so that microclimates and disease resistance and ripening and a variance of growing conditions could be addressed, for ensuring a ready supply across all possible disasters. Much of that legacy has been lost.
Industrial production squashes this kind of resilience in favour of ‘illusions of shameless abundance’, tied to scaled up methods. For instance, the Cariboo potato is a yummy garden variety but proscribed by AgCan because it messes up tractor attachments.
Stores pour bleach on fresh produce so nobody can pull out out of the dumpster. They're rather destroy good food than feed a single mouth in need.
They attempt to cover their tracks by allowing their customers to donate to some conjob of a charity at the checkout line. This also provides them with huge tax credits/breaks which is the only real reason they even bother with donation anything.
amusing part is it can all be fixed by everyone realizing what an actual portion sizes are, and eating that or less..but no, things need to be upsized large, etc...
It could be fixed in a lot of ways, but that requires people to acknowledge that they're mortal and flawed. I wish you luck with that endeavor while facing "American exceptionalism". It's extremely difficult to get anyone to admit to their faults.
Completely fucking off-topic.
we throw away too much food because people have been trained to over eat so companies produce more then what's actually necessary. to me, this can't be more on topic.
That's plainly not why.
Yes it is.
See? Easy when you don’t have to justify a position. Shall I make an appeal to authority to seal the toxicity?
I don't have to state the square root of seventeen million to say it's not three.
You came in hot, calling Americans fat for eating too much, and asserting with no evident rationale that this must be directly connected to businesses... having food left over. They eat so much there's too much left. Uh huh.
You
Nah, wasn’t me. Read.
fat for eating too much
Wait, is anyone in the medical community contesting that? Besides, that’s a tangent to the comment that triggered you, I think.
asserting with no evident rationale that this must be directly connected to businesses... having food left over
Yes, I think the comment that irked you is assuming that the reader accepts the premises that the USA is overconsumptive, that this is due to an ideology of endless surplus, that the cancerlike imperative that line must go up is laying waste to everything, and that these thought patterns lead to bad decisions like OP is calling out.
Not evident to you, I suppose… fair enough.
Oh, so you're just barging in to act smug about someone else's brain fart. That's worse. You know that's worse, right?
This ends here.
I didn’t barge in, it's a thread in a forum and some imperious commenter was being toxic and it's just fucking exhausting to deal with sometimes, so if someone helps out that's usually great.
If you want to talk about the issue instead of picking fights, fine. Otherwise don't turn the place into reddit.
Zero reason these couldn't be donated to a shelter. Just another example of American christian hypocrisy
My parents lived through famine in the 1950s in northern Ontario ... in Canada! They were born and raised in the wilderness and lived the first 20 years of their lives on their own without any government support, participation or inclusion. They were also survivors of the residential school system as children, so they survived IN SPITE of what the government tried to do to them.
So as children, whenever we would ever think of throwing away any edible food ... mom and dad would scold us and lecture us on the fact that they and their parents had to starve at one point in their lives.
I'm middle aged now, my parents are gone but I'll always remember their words and whenever I see any amount of food that might be thrown away, I do my best to save it, share it, preserve it ... or at the very least, give it to dogs, animals or crumble it up for birds to eat.
They taught me that one of the greatest sins that any person can perform is to waste food or deny it from someone else that might need it or use it.
Ofc (of fucking course) it's chick fil a lol
My high school friend worked in a bagel shop and when she worked Fridays or Saturdays, she always showed up to the party with like 3 dozen bagels. Every high schooler with a job was envious of Einstein's employees because their boss was actually human.
There are laws in place now in the US that encourage businesses to donate unused restaurant food. You’d think a “Christian” company like chik-fil-a would do that.
Not food related, but this story brought the memory to mind.
I used to work at a place that bought and sold used books, games, consoles and other stuff. If a console got through inspection and it turned out not to be sellable because of minor issues, it didn't just get thrown away, they took it out back and smashed it with a sledgehammer. I have a vivid rage filled memory of there being a perfectly functional Xbox 360 that had a broken eject button that you could easily eject with a pen or paperclip that they smashed to pieces. This was when Xbox 360 was still the latest and greatest. Well, as great as it ever was, anyway.
This is honestly insane. And it's such an American way of thinking. Y'all need help.
This also happens in Europe.. My mom used to work in catering and was officially not allowed to take anything home. "just in case you make/order more so you deliberately take it home"
The manager has a point though. If you get to decide how many cookies to make and you know that if you decide to make too many cookies then you get the extra ones for free, well, then you'd be more principled than most people if you never gave in to the temptation (conscious or subconscious) to make too many.
I'm in a weird position myself, because I know someone at a food bank who brings me expired food that the food bank would otherwise throw away. The local grocery store donates that food when it's close to expiring and often the food bank can't give it all away in time. The thing is that while the people the food bank serves are not likely to be lost customers for the store, I am. I would be buying food there if I wasn't getting this free food, which is presumably why the store doesn't give expiring food away to just anyone. Technically, I'm not breaking a rule because the store doesn't explicitly require the food bank to throw away the food I'm being given, but my point is that I don't think I could be trusted to decide how many cookies to make if I got to keep the extras.
then you'd be more principled than most people if you never gave in to the temptation (conscious or subconscious) to make too many.
I would love to see if there are studies about that. Because, frankly, I doubt it.
Capitalists believe that labor will steal from the company whenever possible, because they think labor is morally inferior to capital - after all, if they were good, hardworking, well-educated people, they wouldn't be working minimum wage food service jobs, right?
American "Christians" believe that poor people are poor because they are more sinful than rich people, so fundie outfits like Jesus Chicken here believe that poor people will steal whenever given the opportunity.
But that's not actually how human beings work.
The average human being does believe that wasting food is wrong. The average human being does believe that stealing is wrong. The average human being does follow explicit and implicit social norms (like being a good steward of their employer's resources) without threats of punishment.
And frankly, when employees aren't good stewards of their employer's resources, it's because the employer has been a bad steward of their employees first. Good companies earn the loyalty of their employees. Bad companies get the same treatment they give.
The only way I would be tempted to make more cookies than necessary as a Chick-fil-A worker is if I or my coworkers were paid so little that we were literally going hungry - because if Chick-fil-A pays so badly that it's workers don't have enough to eat, fuck em.
I mean, it sounds like you're thinking "if I was an employee I would be tempted to make extra cookies for myself". Which is sure, reasonable, cookies are yummy. But would you actually do it? Or would there be other considerations, like moral (stealing is wrong) or practical (this franchise isn't making very much profit, and if it closes I lose my job) that would outweigh the desire for a short-term cookie benefit?
And if you were working at some place that wasn't a shitty employee destroying fast food chain, someplace that you wanted to see do well - like a bakery where you knew and liked the owner, and where the owner treated you and the other employees fairly - how much stronger would those other considerations be?
The idea that I would be tempted to steal or waste resources just because I had the opportunity, so I might as well? No. That's capitalist logic - if you see an opportunity for profit, you take it, whether you need it or not, whether it's morally right or not. But actual human beings have values beyond profit maximization.
The last line hits the nail on the head: the capitalists expect that the workers would try to fuck them over because it's exactly what they'd do to the workers if given the chance.
The catastrophic outcome in this imagined nightmare scenario of yours is that the underpaid laborers are able to eat some cookies.
Surely you would agree that letting employees dictate how much free shit they can take home is bad policy?
Take the cookie dough and stick it up his tailpipe
Throwing food away because capitalism
Nope.
Throwing away food because lawsuits
Litigation over food poisoning? Now we can't officially let anyone have anything remotely stale because the organization bears the weight of any blowback and your job is at risk. So if you enjoy eating, they need you to ensure others can't.
Naaah. That's typical anarcho-capitalist/Republican crap - we have to do (insert bad thing here) because of those eeeeevil laws and those eeeeevil lawyers, and if we didn't have laws and lawyers, we could just do the right thing without fear of lawsuits!
Bull fucking shit.
There is no more risk of food poisoning from these cookies at the end of the business day then there is at the beginning of the business day when they went out for sale.
Management isn't throwing those cookies away from fear of food poisoning.
They're throwing those cookies away because they would rather waste food than let people have free cookies.
Which is even more bullshit than the obvious because there are liability protection laws in place to prevent that kind of litigation.
fucj it, over make them anyways so the company loses more money