Manager keeps leaving passive-aggressive notes about messy candy aisle, overworked grocery store employee secretly throws $1,000 of useless candy into trash and gets a raise: 'I was going to sort it all out for good'

Author image for Isabella Penn
Isabella Penn
May 27, 2025 1:00 PM EDT

Supermarkets are pretty much just organized chaos. I remember when I first moved out on my own, I'd have to call my mom when I was grocery shopping and ask what aisle certain products were located in because it seemed impossible to find anything. With thousands of products to manage, from fresh produce to seasonal candy, grocery store stockers must have to work around the clock to keep the shelves looking full and orderly. Shoppers might not think twice about grabbing that box of cereal, but behind the scenes, there's a constant hustle to make it all look effortless. And yes, we see you reaching to the back of the shelf for the newest expiration date. We do it too.

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  • But when things don't get done on time, it’s often the cashiers who are left picking up the slack. Stocking candy shelves might not be in their job description, but someone’s got to do it. In this story, one fed-up overnight cashier found himself drowning in a sea of unorganized candy, with passive-aggressive notes from management piling up. So he took matters into his own hands and secretly trashed over $1,000 of useless candy. Instead of getting fired… he got a raise.

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  • "Threw away over $1,000 worth of candy and got a raise"

    In the early 1990s when I was in my 20s I worked at grocery store in the Midwest whose name rhymes with herbs that was owned by the chain Kroger. After working days for about six months I was eventually move to
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  • working the 11 to 7 or 10 to 6 overnight shifts and found that I really preferred them both for the clientele and for the different pace and not having to deal directly with the clueless general manager. One of the
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  • duties of the lone overnight checker was to restock all of the candy and snacks at the multiple checkout lanes. The candy was stored in the stairwell giving the only access to the second floor office
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  • near the front of the store (which was an obvious fire hazard). Just picture ~10 opened cardboard boxes stacked along a not particularly wide stairwell and you could imagine how messed up the whole thing was.
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  • A lady who worked in the morning who inventoried the candy remaining on the shelf was a different person than the afternoon lady whose job it was to occasionally(read never) inventory remaining candy in the
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  • stairwell. Then, daytime checkers who were supposed to fill the lulls between customers by cleaning their check stations and restocking candy would just grab whatever was handy at the bottom of the stairs,
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  • including opening brand new packages to take out. the individual sale packages inside to top up their aisles displays meaning that over time. those ~10 large cardboard boxes of candy each had a bunch of
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  • partial boxes and loose pieces inside of just random candy with no organization. Because I worked as the overnight checker I was constantly getting notes attached to my time card
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    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • from the general manager (who only had his job because he was golf buddies with the district manager and had never worked in a grocery store before three years before that) reminding me to sort out the mess by
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  • stocking the candy. One of the banes of my existence was the ordering lady in the morning ordering a bunch of Cherry Nibs. Apparently it was part of a discount deal to buy a
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  • bunch of them yet we barely sold any of them. There were unopened and partial boxes of them in every one of the larger boxes that held candy as well as the mad assortment of other candy.
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  • Finally after about a dozen notes attached to my time card over the course of a month I decided to act. One night I pulled all the boxes down off of the stairs and told the night manager
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  • that I was going to sort it all out for good and he said fine. He was actually a cool guy who let me get work done and ran a very relaxed yet efficient shift. I sorted all the candy into chocolate, gum, suckers,
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  • basically by category labeled about six of the boxes, put all the stuff back in their proper boxes, and then put all the rest of the candy in a cart along with the trash that it was my job to take
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  • out from the registers at night. I then proceeded to throw what I can only estimate was $1000 or more worth of candy, including 90% of those Nibs, into the trash compactor in the back of
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  • the store with all of the trash on top of it so the next person who used it wouldn't notice a bunch of crushed candy and report me. The next night when I clocked in I was
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  • pleasantly surprised to find that instead of being fired there was a note on my time card letting me know good job, and that I would be getting a $.25 an hour raise starting on my next paycheck.
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  • Let it be known that nothing containing chocolate went into the trash as I am not a heathen!
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  • Zigzidu Increased pay, increased safety, reduced diabetes, you are a champion of the people sir!
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  • SwervingLemon You invented candy crush?
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  • GreenEyed Photographr There are times when evil must be done for good reason. Throwing away candy (of any sort, even candy I personally loathe) is evil, but you had to do what you had to do.
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  • shroomigator That manager was just tired of maneuvering around those boxes
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  • lol_camis This is one of my favourite stories to tell.
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  • When I was in college, I was applying for a summer job. I got two offers at the same time for full time. I accepted the one that was closer to home. It was a local grocery store chain (Fairway Market in Victoria BC).
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  • When I started, it turned out I had been lied to. It was 5 hours a week, not 40. And at this point, all the unskilled jobs had been taken by other college students and I was left kinda screwed over. I decided I would
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  • keep the job, but make them regret it. My job was primarily stocking shelves. We were told that if your ever see an expired product, pull it from the shelf and put it in the donation bin. So I
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  • did. Over my 4 months there I made it my goal to go through every single item on every single shelf and get rid of anything even a day past its best-before date. It became apparent that
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  • nobody had ever done this before. I must have got rid of thousands upon thousands of dollars of food and donated it to needy families. All the while, management couldn't do a
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  • thing because I was just following company policy.
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Tags

supermarket candy humor employee job malicious compliance work night shift raise cashier petty inventory Horrible Bosses stock funny grocery store
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