Manager bans chairs during shifts, employee take 'fatigue breaks' to maliciously comply

JR Atkinson • Writer and Editor

Jun 2, 2026 9:00 PM EDT

What would you do if your workplace took away your chairs?

If you've ever worked retail or in the service industry, you know how exhausting it is to work on your feet all day. You know just how tired you get after a day of working non-stop on your feet. You wish you could just sit down for a time, and you wonder why you can't. Especially as a cashier. Nobody loses out if you're sitting down, plus you'll have more energy to bring to your shift. Good managers realize this, and prioritize their employees' happiness over something as trivial as "appearances." Not this manager, though, in a story that was shared to the r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit. Appearances aren't everything. They're just ways for people to control what's happening while making the lives of their employees worse. So often, managers make decisions that affect their employees negatively without thinking of the consequences. They're thinking about the bottom line and how things look to their boss, and not considering the real-life consequences of their policies and regulations. Employees have to let them know what it's really like for the feedback to truly go the other way. But there's a power imbalance here that shouldn't go unnoticed. It's hard for employees to truly speak their minds, for fear of retaliation. You don't want to go off too hard and end up in a situation that you didn't want to be in. That's why these employees took matters into their own hands.

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via Vitaly Gariev

A grocery store worker holds a crate of tomatoes in his hands
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Manager banned chairs during shifts so everyone started taking "fatigue breaks"

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via DustCipherX
It sometimes feels so good to be a little bit petty. You know it's not your highest form of self, but it's a part of you that you're happy to engage when you need to. This can feel especially rewarding to do at work, when you know that you stand to gain a lot. That's what the employees did here. There was a policy change enacted that they couldn't abide by, so they took matters into their own hands and showed their bosses who was really in charge. Keep reading for the details and see what other commenters had to say about it.
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Commenters gave their support and praise.

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via Prakriti Khajuria

A person bags a bunch of tomatoes at a grocery store
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