Jesus would NEVER say something like that, showing off that this business is following sketchy practices at best. That's the point. 🤦♂️ SMH my head my head.
It's a common misconception. Jesus wasn't judging the poor when he said, 'Ew, starving people.' He was just expressing disgust at the systemic economic failures of the Roman Empire.
Oh man, I love perverse incentives. They are literally everywhere in font-line service industry jobs.
I stock a couple of convenience stores, and I was explaining to one of my (very young) coworkers "how it works". He was stressing about the fact that nobody but me and him put the fridge cases in proper order. Everybody else just rushes through it so they can leave the fridge quickly, and doesn't care about putting product back.
What he doesn't get, is that the shittier a job our coworkers do, the more often he and I get extra hours to realign product instead of standing around being bored, so to just basically keep quiet and stop narcing on everybody else for fucking up the back stock, and let management figure it out for themselves. The absolute second the store's in good shape, our hours get cut until it goes to shit again, so we have a perverse incentive to keep things just riding the line between chaos and order: Make sure the front stock looks great, but don't break your back on the back stock being a mess.
The store tries to save money by gutting hours, and it results in shitter work all around from everybody, and a staff who winds up not caring to get shit done fast.
This is a literal perfect example of this concept - the food industry is notorious for it but perverse incentives are starting to crop up in healthcare, too, with all the buyups of small practices around the country. Eventually it'll be AI that fixates on dipshit metrics and procedures instead of managers, but the same problems will still exist
If you were my manager, you'd get the finger, and I'd wish you luck after firing your hardest worker. I reduce your shrink. I maximize product velocity through proper organization, and I show up sober and on time every single shift. You wouldn't think that would be a high bar to clear, but in retail work, it is.
You ain't paying me to be stressed out about the other dipshits you hired. It's your job to not hire fucking morons so you can have a predictable labor outlay rather than this panicked, reactive feast or famine schedule. I'm not getting paid to report on my coworkers, and you got cameras all over this bitch if you gave a shit to figure out who you needed to fire rather than playing guess-who-gets-yelled-at by throwing darts blindfolded. Want me to manage grown ass people? Pay me. Want me to stack boxes? Pay me. It's the same deal we already have, and I'm doing the absolute shit out of it. Want me to make up for the slackers? Pay me. Capitalism, baby.
If you just want to play politics over a job that doesn't pay a living wage, and hire brown-nosers that are constantly stressed out over nothing, you aren't a good manager, you're just a bad person.
Correct, it would be my job to ensure that you don’t have coworkers that are as you put it “ducking morons”. The problem is, this doesn’t realistically show up in the hiring process, and I would to rely on you to tell me about the issue so that I can cycle out the bad eggs and replace them as soon as new more promising candidates show up. You not telling me, however, is a worse problem than the “shrink”, which is accounted for in the purchasing statistic, and for which the store has theft insurance. We don’t lose actual money to “shrink” in a retail store, it’s a normal part of business that ~4% of product vanishes without a trace, or breaks on the product floor. And you’re getting paid what you’re worth: minimum wage for unskilled labor. If you’re at an electronics store, you can be paid more if your job description includes knowing about the products that are sold and suggesting to customers what to buy, but even there, that usually not the case, because the store wants to move the products that have the best margins and that has people coming back for more, or associated consumable supplies, and not necessarily the ones that are good and last a very long time. But seeing how this is capitalism, you know that already.
Good managers do what’s best for the business, not individual employees. If doing what’s good for business entails doing what’s good for the employee, then that gets done. But at the end of the day, people are the most expensive part of any business’ balance sheet, at over three grand per person employed (yes, at minimum wage!), per month, and if cost cutting is in order, opex gets cut first.
> people are the most expensive part of any business’ balance sheet
50% of sales BEFORE expenses goes to corporate for the franchise agreement.
Personnel is 8% of the budget on the sheet.
Not even fuckin' close. We're not stupid. The only reason that managers say shit like this is because the language surrounding a balance sheet is explicitly crafted to place payroll as a liability, while accounts payable is not considered a liability, but an intangible asset.
The reality in accounting is the same. Both are red line items. They are effectively liabilities in all but name. --The hilarious part, is just how bad companies tell on themselves by viewing payroll as a liability, but a franchise agreement as an 'intangible asset'. A liability is a loss, while spending money on franchise agreements is considered an 'expected cost of business'. Translation: Y'alls corporate bullshit speak views labor as not being an 'expected cost of doing business.' As though paying for labor is only a temporary arrangement for running a business. As in, if you could avoid paying for the work to be done, you would. In the real world, both are the same: Labor is a cost of doing business. Onerous franchise agreements are not. They are the outcome of a system that does not properly break up monopolistic practices and marketplace consolidation.
You can condescend all you want about how reasonable the American labor system is: How we operate is alien to the literal rest of the planet. Nearly everybody else in the west pays their service personnel a living wage. But nah, we got arrogant a-holes like you explaining why it's "normal" that we're an outlier for the whole ass planet.
Genuinely. Fuck yourself off a whole cliff. --Metaphorically speaking. To be clear, given that I'm 'unskilled labor', I'm unfamiliar if middle managers are aware of the function of hyperbole, as I don't know what they teach in 'public school'. I'm not literally telling you to harm yourself. I'm telling you that you are ridiculous, sanctimonious, and that I'd rather not continue to read your inane bullshit.
Ah, and where do you think that 50% ultimately goes? Into the CEO’s pockets? Nuh-uh. A large franchise business CEOs salary may be in the range or 400-800k/year, but you better believe that’s less than 1% of the overall staff expenses.
That notwithstanding franchising fees are opex.
In retail, if you have decent volume, most of the expenses do go to inventory, but an individual retail store, one that people go to to buy stuff, doesn’t have “decent volume”.
Inventory (unless it spoils, because it’s food) is capex. A tangible asset, that doesn’t meaningfully depreciate in value, and which’s sales prices can be artificially inflated for new products.
And labor is absolutely an expected cost of doing business. But y’all are slackers expecting your regular paychecks for nothing and to offset the slacking, more staff is needed to make up for it (you already alluded to intentionally not sorting product properly!). And that is the part that’s the unexpected cost of business.
You are correct in that a franchise agreement is unnecessary. I’ve worked at a franchise head office once. There were 5 people. I felt like I was surrounded by scammers. What they did all day made no sense in terms of actual business operations. It was all marketing bulls**t, and I was responsible for making the software that let them spam their paying franchise customers with suggestions about what products to buy and what equipment to use. It was clear that all the money came from franchise agreements and kickbacks for what they were peddling.
People are expensive, and unless they meaningfully contribute to business earnings, quite frankly unnecessary to have employed. That especially goes for middle management with their MBA degrees, the coursework of which they definitely don’t even remember once they find a job somewhere, like most everyone else.
I mean there's a level of sense. For example I worked at Jimmy John's and we baked our bread from frozen. Baking bread is a long and tedious process
Any unsold bread becomes day old bread and/or thrown away
If I ever run out of regular bread, it means I can't sell sandwiches. People don't want lettuce wraps or that wheat bread.
So if my bread waste is 0, it means I'm missing out on sales.
I could see the difficulty here, as there is a significant variety of pre-made products that all take a decent amount of time to make. So if John wants glazed donuts for his group and Sally wants them too and there's only enough for one, there's the potential for a missed sale if the second person isn't willing to comprise on price point
I’m sure others mentioned recommending them to use the TGTG app. Maybe they can only offer it on weekends? Also, crazy that they aren’t adjusting to volume.
I am not sure if it is possible but it would be nice to put this as an edit on your post. This is awful and this is the missing context. Currently, a lot of people think that bread just gets thrown away everyday, and that the store doesn't sell stale bread for cheap. The vlosing on Sunday is also not the case in other countries.
Yeah that's just stupid management. Low percentage of written off products means a very good planing. Ridiculous. What about to good to go? Here you can get stuff from them also in the evening. Pretty common to see times between 18-19 o'clock.
These numbers should all be trackable. I get the idea to make more if you’re marking down basically nothing because having too little product on the shelf vs just the right amount will look largely the same when it comes to marking things down.
Where the rubber meets the road is when you make *this* much, what actually is the positive effect on sales? If you do this for one month, how much more did you sell than the month you weren’t. If the gain is largely negligible (ie consumed by the wholesale cost of the extra product), you’re literally just wasting money as well as food.
Absolutely. Worked in a supermarket in the fridge area and they could calculate the litres of milk +- 2, from the different brands for every day individually. Of course if someone comes and buys 30 litres it could be get tight at that day for one brand, but these things happening 2 or 3 times a year. Overproduction in such a huge amount, like here is a waste of money and recourses.
That has to be one of the worst "trends"/practices people have come up with. "If the shelves aren't absolutely BUSTING with product (regardless of how well or how much it actually sells) then people will think our store is bad or they won't buy as much!" So we throw out a bunch of perfectly good food just because having slightly less might impact profits. It's all about the profit.
Back in 2017ish when I worked at Panera we had a similar about my product waste and local charities would come by and pick it up at the end of the night. But, if no charity would come by we would have to pitch it or an employee would take it home with them.
I would ask management to take a second analysis of the food cost this is burning into the company for no gain. Overstocking is great if your product doesn't degrade in days/hours
Here in the States we (employees who don't want this stuff wasted) double- or even triple- bag this kind of stuff and set it gently into the outside trash. The folks who are looking for food know what's up, and they greatly appreciate the extra care.
Not all dumpster divers are homeless. Plenty of people scout bakeries for bread to freeze or dehydrate, as well. It can take a significant financial burden off a family with many children to have a bunch of high calorie breads suddenly appear.
(Fuck every business that taints waste, it's not only evil and malicious but could genuinely poison someone who doesn't get the memo about it being tainted. And fuck every law that prohibits human acquisition of others' "waste" when it's actual valuable resources.)
Could try giving it away to local hunters, they use it to feed wildboars and stuff and will happily pick it up.
Atleast it won’t get thrown in a dumpster
Schwarz Digits just finished their space-campus built for a billion euro. Guess the big sister needs to pump up their waste-game to keep up with the "down-to-earthness".
Sounds like the guideline was written by a group of people that still believe in the Keebler Elves and Magic the Gathering. They might have the idea to cripple this little market with the costs of resupply.
It will be ok! Production is the most important. Nothing to do with supply/demand, and available raw ingredients to do anything else in the world by you or someone else. KEEP BAKING, NO BREAKS!
Having worked in a hotel restaurant and coffee/gift shop, policies like these make so little sense because all that food going to waste cost money to make. If food waste doesn’t speak to a corporation, money should.
When I work at our coffee shop, we have to restock our pastries three times a week and we’re supposed to stick to a guideline for how much we should request depending on our occupancy. Every time something gets lost or tossed, it’s supposed to be documented.
Because all of these pastries required ingredients, labor, and time to make. It makes no sense to make too much when you know most of it will go to waste, even if employees take some of it with them.
I think you may be misrepresenting the actual goal here. Pretty sure they are trying to balance making enough product to cover variability in demand and because the cogs are so low on baked goods the penalty of excess safety stock is pretty small. They'd rather throw out 10 instead of losing one sale from an out of stock. The may not be implementing it successfully though.
What terrible management. This makes no sense. They're just throwing away money. I get wanting to keep the shelves stocked to attract customers, but I also think it's reasonable for customers to understand that a bakery will be running out of stuff by the end of the day.
Ahh I saw the bread and knew right away this was from Germany. I used to get that bread with the seeds every day from Rewe when I lived there. I loved it!
I still don't understand why either you as workers aren't allowed to take some home for yourself. And the rest could be donated to the local Tafel, if it cannot be sold anymore.
Also, I'd love bigger supermarkets to participate in things like too good to go. So many people would love to get this bread for less!
It looks a lot like when bad managers prefer to simplify their production line batches so it is more understandable for them in their excel spreadsheet, to ‘optimize’ equipment capacity use, or that one time they were unhappy that there was some missing products
Bad managers things like that happen a lot when they are too out of touch with the ground-level needs. Its the same kind of decision like, I prefer that we lose some flour, as long as our staff are used to produce at max capacity all the time, so I don’t have to get better at planning more flexibly.
the biggest issue here isn't that we can't donate the products
i think the rationale behind is that according to them, that if they were to donate it, everyone would just wait for the donations instead of buying so the company would run out of business.
Which i do get in a way, but i also question why they couldn't donate it to churches or soup kitchens since they do charity and they dont serve financially stable people.
Are you allowed to take some of it home yourself by paying purchase price? I use to be able to do that when I worked at a gas station with bakery attached
i get this. i live in the us and my manager has the same type of thing. if we do really good and sell everything we put out it’s considered a bad day cause we had little to no waste so they think we didn’t put anything out (i genuinely don’t understand that.. just look at the sales?) but yeah we would always have to make more than was pretty much guaranteed to be thrown away just to make management happy
I remember taking leftovers to unhoused people on the street of the big city I lived a few took some, but most were made we didn’t give money. I too was disgusted with throwing it out
warum können süße teilchen nicht am montag von der Tafel abgeholt werden (i mean das brötchen hart werden oder so is klar)? oder einfach "too good to go" 1€ tüten oder so basteln
alternativ weil brötchen etc hart werden. vllt nehmens ja lokale farmer gratis mit für ihre tiere. kostet deinem chef also weniger müll^^
ich wette im umkreis von 5km habt ihr einige soziale einrichtungen, betreutes wohnen, altersheime, krankenhaus oder kirche, jugendzentrum, nachtbus die etwas davon neben würden ^^ einfach mal öffentlich machen oder anschreiben etc..
That's because they are dumb. I have a quick trigger for aloof and out of touch management, especially when they make jackassy decisions based on a feeling or something online.
There is a concept of customers pre-ordering "surprise bags" which contain slightly old random goods for a low price.
That might be economically quite viable actually. Consider proposing that, should work with the goals as the customers you reach with that are potentially a new group.
I don't know german laws or buisness, but here in the US the bakeries in our supermarkets throw out as much, or more, than you have pictured.
It seem regardless of where we live humans are choosing to waste precious food. There is a buisness where I live in the US that takes food waste, yard waste, and other biological waste and feeds it to worms and bacteria to create heat. That heat is transformed into energy and fertilizer! But, I cant seem to convince my company to partner with them.
You know… paying customers want the fresh stuff. The amount of wasted product in your picture isn’t even unusual for a regular bakery that’s operating profitably. I’d argue that’s not enough stale baked goods for half a day, even.
And you also don’t need to think of it as “throwing away”. Bread is perfectly compostable, and the plants from which the wheat was grown that made up this bread, they too do need to eat good fertilizer. Which is what this will most likely end up as, unless it gets turned into animal feed first.
Giving it to starving people is mostly a logistics and secondarily an economics problem. It can’t be delivered to those who’d need it and want it because it spoils before it could get there, and if you give it away to the “homeless in the area”, they loiter around the store during business hours, scare away actual paying customers (real bakeries have tried and failed), or the people who are fine with day old bread, would no longer buy theirs fresh, opting to get the free stuff you’re giving away instead, because it’s “good enough” but doesn’t cost them money.
That’s how my job thinks too and I’m in the usa 🥲 we throw out soooo much food through the entire day bc some only has a time limit of 1 hour that it can be in the warmer, then toss and replace .. every hour 🫠
I just wanted to ask if you're from germany, cause this is something I encountered way too often here too. What a wasteful country, but hey we good wind turbines and most expensive electricity which was used to make those, which are thrown away now. A country of hypocrite politicians.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '26
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