Easy As Pie And Cool As Cake

Our supermarket cafe has a very strict rule for staff: no eating the food unless you’ve paid and are on break. It’s an absolute rule, and it’s a fireable offence. We have a hot food line out front where customers can select food, but we also have a back area where we grill food to order and have the big dishwashers and refrigerators. We’ve all been guilty of grabbing a snack here and there, but if a manager is around it’s an absolute no-no.

Our fresh cream cake slices — usually three different kinds — are all individually plated and marked with the date. It’s late in the day, and our manager has just instructed us to pull all of yesterday’s cakes and mark them down. Then, he headed out into the main store. We finish the job, but as no managers are around, my coworker keeps one piece of cake back and starts eating it.

She is standing there, fork loaded with cake halfway to her mouth, when the manager walks in deep in conversation WITH OUR AREA MANAGER. Everyone freezes. The coworker, cool as a cucumber, carries on, eats the mouthful of cake, and then says:

Coworker: “Yes, the customer was right; this is stale. I’ll pull the other slices.”

Then, she breezed out, collected two other plates of cake, and recorded them as “waste” as she binned them.

I’m pretty sure the manager knew what was going on, but she got away with it.