Kind of orthogonal to the story, but anyone who steals lunch or food from a co-worker should be fired immediately. There's a 0% chance that someone who steals others' stuff is a good, honest person in other parts of their life.
I have fired an employee for stealing lunches (with plenty of evidence, of course). I would have fired the person in this story immediately if it were within my power.
Similarly, I have also fired people for other obvious character failures, such lying about bereavement leave to take time off. (It happened so often at one job that I ceased to be amazed when I caught it.) For example, one guy brought me an obituary for his dad that was obviously altered (fonts on dates didn't match, etc.). Google immediately informed me that his dad had died three years earlier. That was a fun conversation.
For those who think such behavior should be considered a mere mistake and that firing is too extreme, please tell me how such poor character can be corrected by actions taken by management at their workplace. If the job requires good character, then the only correct response to such behavior is to separate them from the company, as happened in this case.
Six-year-old primary school children who haven't been disciplined yet steal lunches. Not supposedly functional members of society.
That sort of thing gets old, though, so I don't manage anyone now. Life is much less stressful that way.
I agree, most companies don't offer enough PTO.
Want to give us some examples?
Honest mixups happen and when they are followed up with an apology then it's fine. Let common sense prevail.
I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.
I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.
That said, I really can't imagine any situation where it is reasonable if you are talking about people's homemade lunches, in a well labeled lunch box - as is the case in this story.
- Someone tells another coworker they can have their lunch, but they grab the wrong one (because the tag fell off or they didn't see the label)
- Someone says there is leftover food available in the kitchen after some catered meal, and the person didn't realize that container wasn't part of it.
- A new employee got confused about which refrigerator is the 'office stocked one' and which one is the 'personal items one'
- It was fridge cleaning day, and the person thought the food was getting tossed out anyway, so they ate it. Turns out the person was going to eat it that day (this one is borderline, not only because it is kinda gross but also kinda not cool)
- Two people had similar lunches and they just grabbed the wrong one without paying a ton of attention (much more common when a group of people go out to lunch together and come back with leftovers)
- A loose, packaged food item got knocked over and fell into someone else's food container.
Some of these are probably pretty rare, but I have seen many of them happen.
I've caught myself once or twice where I grabbed the wrong thing. But sometimes in a rush, in sleep addled daze, or just not paying attention, it could happen. I would hate to be fired for a mistake like that.
- Grab-and-go sandwich from local vendor was eaten by wrong person. They had a similarly wrapped sandwich in the same refrigerator.
- Identical brands of yogurt, milk, cream, etc. were used by a non-owner with a similar bottle.
- Similar fruit was taken.
- Identical brand peanut butter was used by the non-owner.
None of these other than maybe the sandwich are like the original post, but these mistakes do happen.
In these cases, it was always resolved with an “oops, sorry” and a replacement item (sometimes waved off)... and usually more deliberate bespoke labeling or containering of common items.
Also, especially in tech workplaces, never underestimate absentmindedness.
You come back to a missing lunch and become incensed, but start to cool off when given an explanation.
It would be easy for someone to think some food was leftover from the day before, or that an apple or yogurt was meant for anyone.
And that’s not a hypothetical. He hasn’t confused our lunches but we do use the same style Pyrex containers. Mine is usually in a bag with fruit and such, but occasionally I put it in the fridge by itself.
Oh! and another: We have a certain corner table in our lunch room where we traditionally put free food. Someone set their lunch item there while doing something else. I grabbed it and ate it. When we realized I apologized profusely(while other co-workers said "oops, she shouldn't have put it there"), then bought her a replacement.
Usually if one is a self-centered jerk who just grabs the first thing that barely looks like their lunch from the fridge and doesn't care much about others.
Or if people just buy similar lunches from the same place and keep all of them on the fridge, confusing similar names/packaging, but yeah, it's usually the 1st case.
Someone who has to be confronted is just hoping you’ll believe their excuse because that’s worked in the past.
He apologized and bought me lunch the next day so it was absolutely fine in the end but there was a moment of confusion and some colleagues mocking me.
It's definitely marginal and indicates a kind of thoughtlessness. Firing? Maybe not. But it's not easily forgotten.
It's conceivable that someone could have a visually identical container (brown paper bag) and a visually identical lunch (sandwich and apple), in which case yes - that would be a mistake.
I'd bet that that is the case for much less than 5% of the lunches misappropriated.
Calling deliberate theft a "mistake" is fundamentally dishonest - it pollutes the meaning of the word mistake.
Steal my _chair_, though, and may all the laws of Gods and Men come down upon you in their most unmitigated rigor! That has happened to me _way_ too often.
I have never "accidentally" eaten an entire lunch that wasn't mine. I'm actually offended that people are defending this. It's stealing. It's petty, childish, dishonest behavior. I think I would just be dumbstruck speechless if a coworker actually was brazen enough to just take my food and eat it. It's comically absurd.
It's a bit over the top to have that in place to enforce the policy unless it was a known issue in that workplace. So the statement the GP made seems a bit extreme without context.
Sure, they are all technically "stealing" stuff, but lighten up.
And, while I agree that eating other people's lunch is unethical, we should be very wary of the "broken window" attitude towards lashing out severe punishment for minor things.
Very often it goes together with leniency towards CEOs "giving themselves" huge exit bonuses & so on.
The issue is that the last employee has to have the moral integrity to fire himself.