'I am counting EVERYTHING': Retail worker maliciously complies with supervisor's contradictory instructions

Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor

Dec 31, 2023 2:00 PM EST

If you give unclear, contradictory instructions to your employees, you're just asking for problems. It makes you wonder how these supervisors got promoted in the first place. Clarity is pretty much the most important part of the job, and if you can't do that, you have no business expecting your team to follow you blindly.

This thread was posted to Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by u/Correct_Campaign3707, who worked on the Member Service team at a retail company and was tasked with checking self-checkout receipts at the door. His supervisor told him to be extra careful about these receipts but to keep the line moving. In order to do both of these with precision, OP needed to keep calling in the supervisor back to the front of the store for an extra set of hands.

Here we have an empowering form of malicious compliance. You want to tell this guy to take extra steps but also be more efficient? Fine, but that means you're going to have to help too. Keep scrolling below for the full play-by-play. When you're done, here is a collection of managers who had unreasonable reasons for firing folks.