If you don’t trust someone to appropriately handle waste

They trusted him for 10 years, presumably until someone turned him in.

This is prime executive laziness. ... not getting a receipt for tax purposes,

What if they were against giving the food away? what if their worry is that someone would hide the stuff till it expires to give more away. It's not a very neighborly line of thinking, but it's also not unreasonable.

. Managers are supposed to be people with enough education, experience, and established trust to make decisions on behalf of the company.

No way, in corporate land, the managers are there to enforce the rules. They're there to order the food, make sure the staff comes in, make sure the food gets thrown away if that's policy. Most managers don't get the discretion to break protocol when they feel like it.

If they aren’t trusted, they shouldn’t have been made a manager.

*Well they apparently solved that problem

edit* added a line

Yeah, that's just how waste works.

Big Box retail, we used to have to ship most everything non-salable back to depot. The trucks would unload 10 pallets and load one back up every couple weeks. The depo would trash the stuff with proof and get the credits from the manufacturer.

I worked in fast food too, some of the managers would allow some waste to be taken, but it would have been their asses if the DM's caught wind. Slippery slope from accidentally cooking too much chicken to making enough to feed your family dinner. Had one manager once who traded food with Little Caesers and we all had pizza that night, it was awesome.

We had this substitute manager once, she was from a busy store. They always sent the chicken guy home at 7 to save cash and had the back line cook throw down another tray if things got low. Before they sent the chicken guy home, she had him put down two trays. That's 8 chickens worth of parts. On a busy night, we might maybe sell a half a tray between 7 and close.

hey, Rumba, can you tray up the chicken and finish cleaning if I send C home? Yeah sure. (C was always clean AF) I go back there and there were 2 fryers full. Ohhh SHIT.

End of the night we sold maybe half a tray. She came back all worried. Hey, we have kinda WAY too much chicken, I'll be here for a couple more days, any chance you can help me spread the waste out between now and Friday?

I got to take home a trashbag with 36 pieces. And just made almost exactly what we'd need for the next couple days. It was down to breading/cooking a few pieces at a time but we made it work.

As far as I'm aware of, no.

and because capitalism

Not too many cliffs were they're from. Now ice floes OTOH, lots. And it was the elderly. And rarely.

Begging your pardon, but Eskimo is considered pejorative. The people in question called themselves Inuit.

California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988)

The Supreme Court held that trash placed outside the curtilage for public collection is abandoned. But the ruling explicitly notes that trash on private property remains protected and is not automatically abandoned.

Courts repeatedly cite Greenwood to show that location and owner intent matter.

This is why workplace trash is not public trash.

https://news.iheart.com/featured/ken-dashow/content/2017-10-23-do-guitar-companies-really-order-retailers-to-smash-flawed-instruments/

So the manager in the original post probably brought some day old baked goods that would have been thrown in the garbage. The gas station I worked at had a lock on the bin so people wouldn't easily rummage through the bins for things like day old goods. Because it causes problems downstream to clean up after people dumpster dive. The other thing that can happen is something dumb happens somewhere, and some senior management (maybe even VP) sends out a memo that bans anyone from doing anything but what is now written policy. Lowest common denominator situation.

Basically upper management doesn't trust boots on the ground so they make broad sweeping rules that they strictly enforce.

I'm no longer allowed to use a work vehicle when running errands and also stop by a drive through even though that exact process was described as "managers discretion" in the policy/procedure.

.... Because one person elsewhere got rear-ended in a drive through, all 250+ branches of my company can no longer allow it's delivery drivers to pick up food on the way back to branch.

I'm assuming the person in the original post has a policy in place that is exactly saying don't do what he did

Yeah, most excuses I hear are really just excuses. Even had a shop refuse to sell me something after its best before date despite it being on the shelf at a reduced price. They said its illegal to sell it to me - no it isn't, there is another shop just round the corner which makes that their entire business model by selling reduced stuff past its best before date.

Had I been feeling more argumentative I would have been tempted to leave the money on the counter and just walk off with it. Yes it is kinda stealing, but no one is going to enforce that. "So you are saying he left the money on the counter and walked off with it? Yeah stop wasting our time"

Only because we let corporations write off the value of the food they donate to charity, off their taxes. Canada does not let them do that, and they have a lot less donations to food banks as a result.

It's all quid pro quo stuff, you notice food banks make you prove you live in the area with a piece of mail, they aren't giving it out to anyone, it's a charity that harvests tax write offs.