I agree completely. Not only does theft make their work untrustworthy, their actions have a huge impact on the morale of their coworkers.

I have fired an employee for stealing lunches (with plenty of evidence, of course). I would have fired the person in this story immediately if it were within my power.

Similarly, I have also fired people for other obvious character failures, such lying about bereavement leave to take time off. (It happened so often at one job that I ceased to be amazed when I caught it.) For example, one guy brought me an obituary for his dad that was obviously altered (fonts on dates didn't match, etc.). Google immediately informed me that his dad had died three years earlier. That was a fun conversation.

For those who think such behavior should be considered a mere mistake and that firing is too extreme, please tell me how such poor character can be corrected by actions taken by management at their workplace. If the job requires good character, then the only correct response to such behavior is to separate them from the company, as happened in this case.

I don't know if I would sack them right off the bat, but I would definitely keep a very close eye on them. The fact that they are adults in the workplace who steal from colleagues definitely points to their character simply being incompatible with societal norms, so who knows what other demoralising actions they are taking part in?

Six-year-old primary school children who haven't been disciplined yet steal lunches. Not supposedly functional members of society.

When I was younger, sometimes I would hesitate to fire people even though they had crossed a bright line into fireable territory. With experience, it became very clear that it was never a good idea, so I stopped hesitating.

That sort of thing gets old, though, so I don't manage anyone now. Life is much less stressful that way.

Can't say I blame the bereavement guy. Nearly every firm in the United States has an unacceptably stingy PTO policy.

In this instance (and most of the similar instances), if he needed the day off, he would have gotten it with fairly minimal notice. Without pay if he had used up his available PTO, yes, but so was the bereavement.

I agree, most companies don't offer enough PTO.

Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.

Here’s what that sounds like when an innocent person does it: “I’m so sorry, your bag looked just like mine and I didn’t notice it until I heated it up. Can I buy you lunch?”

Someone who has to be confronted is just hoping you’ll believe their excuse because that’s worked in the past.

Accidentally take, sure. Accidentally consume? Maybe one bite. Unless there were some odd circumstances, like mental deficiency, or nearly identical meals, beyond one bite is very difficult to believe.

I accidentally consumed a coworkers yogurt cup once (and told her/replaced it as soon as I realized). I had started daring a different coworker and she had said something like "you can eat my yogurt in my yellow bag at the front-left of the fridge". Unfortunately, we had 2 fridges in the break room at the time...

Another HN user offered a story (that doesn't seem super unlikely) that would disagree with you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16944591

You don't consider that an odd circumstance? I do, but maybe it's more common than I expect.

I mean I'd say it's odd but if you're going to have a rule that immediately results in people being fired you have to think of odd/edge cases.

Depends if you have an oldschool wife who packs you a lunch, and you didn't bother to ask if it was bologna or tuna.

Do tell, which are a couple of those ways that someone might accidentally pick someone else's lunch box, open it, and start eating some unknown food without realizing?

I use the same container as a coworker. His wife packs his lunch. When I bring in chili or spaghetti he could honestly mistake it for his own. Less likely with most of my lunches though.

And that’s not a hypothetical. He hasn’t confused our lunches but we do use the same style Pyrex containers. Mine is usually in a bag with fruit and such, but occasionally I put it in the fridge by itself.

At our office, nobody brings lunch boxes. Our office manager is always ordering snacks for the fridge, and there's leftovers from group lunches.

It would be easy for someone to think some food was leftover from the day before, or that an apple or yogurt was meant for anyone.

It might be precariously positioned, and an unwitting coworker might have the misfortune of opening the refrigerator door only to see your pyrex lunch container fall to the ground and shatter. They clean it up, but are in too much of a rush to make a company-wide announcement of the smashed lunch.

You come back to a missing lunch and become incensed, but start to cool off when given an explanation.

Here's mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16959947

Oh! and another: We have a certain corner table in our lunch room where we traditionally put free food. Someone set their lunch item there while doing something else. I grabbed it and ate it. When we realized I apologized profusely(while other co-workers said "oops, she shouldn't have put it there"), then bought her a replacement.

Someone else reshuffles the boxes in the fridge to make space?

Also, especially in tech workplaces, never underestimate absentmindedness.

Yeah... no. I just don't see how this is possible, other than a 1 in a million case of a coworker happening to use exactly the same container which contains a meal that had the same appearance as your own. It's just not plausible.

> There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch

Usually if one is a self-centered jerk who just grabs the first thing that barely looks like their lunch from the fridge and doesn't care much about others.

Or if people just buy similar lunches from the same place and keep all of them on the fridge, confusing similar names/packaging, but yeah, it's usually the 1st case.

But the person who makes a mistake should be willing to own up to it and buy the other person a new lunch, at least.

| There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch

Want to give us some examples?

Sure! I have worked in a lot of offices over the years, and most of these have actually happened at least once:

- Someone tells another coworker they can have their lunch, but they grab the wrong one (because the tag fell off or they didn't see the label)

- Someone says there is leftover food available in the kitchen after some catered meal, and the person didn't realize that container wasn't part of it.

- A new employee got confused about which refrigerator is the 'office stocked one' and which one is the 'personal items one'

- It was fridge cleaning day, and the person thought the food was getting tossed out anyway, so they ate it. Turns out the person was going to eat it that day (this one is borderline, not only because it is kinda gross but also kinda not cool)

- Two people had similar lunches and they just grabbed the wrong one without paying a ton of attention (much more common when a group of people go out to lunch together and come back with leftovers)

- A loose, packaged food item got knocked over and fell into someone else's food container.

Some of these are probably pretty rare, but I have seen many of them happen.

I've eaten/drank parts of co-workers lunches unwittingly thinking they were part of the community food/beverage selection.

I never got reprimanded, but I did have to sheepishly explain to a coworker that I drank his soda thinking it was one of the community ones since it was in the door of the fridge and unmarked.

I now work at a company with an extensive free kitchen and you have to do an extremely good job of marking your personal food since the default assumption will now be that the food is everyones.

Same lunch box as someone else. In an office of 7 people, I had the same lunch box as two coworkers. Have someone else make your lunch or bring a generic enough item and it could happen.

Honest mixups happen and when they are followed up with an apology then it's fine. Let common sense prevail.

This happens occasionally at my work, and I'm pretty sure it is always accidental - but it is because we get food delivered every day, and a combination of food not being very well labeled, orders getting messed up, and people forgetting what they ordered that day - things get mixed up.

That said, I really can't imagine any situation where it is reasonable if you are talking about people's homemade lunches, in a well labeled lunch box - as is the case in this story.

There's company paid lunch where the leftovers are put into the fridge for people to take it later before throwing it out. A coworker puts their own food into the fridge without putting their name on it. You take your coworkers food thinking it was leftovers from lunch.

A whole lunch may be a bit much unless it’s some sort of pre-packaged food, but a few I have seen over the years:

- Grab-and-go sandwich from local vendor was eaten by wrong person. They had a similarly wrapped sandwich in the same refrigerator.

- Identical brands of yogurt, milk, cream, etc. were used by a non-owner with a similar bottle.

- Similar fruit was taken.

- Identical brand peanut butter was used by the non-owner.

None of these other than maybe the sandwich are like the original post, but these mistakes do happen.

In these cases, it was always resolved with an “oops, sorry” and a replacement item (sometimes waved off)... and usually more deliberate bespoke labeling or containering of common items.

Takeout box is the same and food is similar. I have the same container and it isn't labeled. Food got moved around. Forgot I didn't bring food that day.

I've caught myself once or twice where I grabbed the wrong thing. But sometimes in a rush, in sleep addled daze, or just not paying attention, it could happen. I would hate to be fired for a mistake like that.

One comes to mind for me. At my office, people will often leave snacks, leftovers, or just food for the office on a table for anyone to take. It's within the realm of possibility that someone may leave their lunch unattended on the table and a passerby may think it's up for grabs.

Here's mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16959980

I actually had a boss who stole my lunch. His wife cooks for him so he didn't know/remember what food he was bringing to work and he had the same kind of (IKEA) lunch box as me.

He apologized and bought me lunch the next day so it was absolutely fine in the end but there was a moment of confusion and some colleagues mocking me.

That's not stealing. That's just an unintentional mistake. Pedantic, yeah, but quite different morally.

Firing someone for a mistake is a fairly extreme response, and should be reserved for extreme mistakes. This sounds like a correctable habit, with some mentoring and coaching.

There is a big difference between mistakenly eating someone else's lunch and being a thief.

It's conceivable that someone could have a visually identical container (brown paper bag) and a visually identical lunch (sandwich and apple), in which case yes - that would be a mistake.

I'd bet that that is the case for much less than 5% of the lunches misappropriated.

Calling deliberate theft a "mistake" is fundamentally dishonest - it pollutes the meaning of the word mistake.

If you're a white-collar worker who is making a decent paycheck, you should definitely be accountable for the action of taking clearly-labeled food that doesn't belong to you. We should be merciful and try to help them, but that person is also committing a small form of thievery.

The spice was the correction. The fact that they tried to push back instead of owing up shows it's uncorrectable.

Usually people that I've worked with that have this kind of habit also have other habits, like copying open source into commercial code with no regard for license, checking in code under other people's names, flagrantly disturbing massive chunks of code (e.g. checking in whole-repository reformat) without telling anyone, etc.

It's definitely marginal and indicates a kind of thoughtlessness. Firing? Maybe not. But it's not easily forgotten.

Theft is a correctable habit? It's theft. The perp KNEW it wasn't his food, then when exposed, got HR involved to cover his tracks.

Please correct your habit of downplaying deliberate theft by calling it a mistake. Do you need any mentoring or coaching for doing that?

I've never had someone steal my lunch, nor have I stolen anybody's lunch, so the issue seems a bit moot to me.

Steal my _chair_, though, and may all the laws of Gods and Men come down upon you in their most unmitigated rigor! That has happened to me _way_ too often.

I'm sorry, but how are the other replies to you defending this behavior...?

I have never "accidentally" eaten an entire lunch that wasn't mine. I'm actually offended that people are defending this. It's stealing. It's petty, childish, dishonest behavior. I think I would just be dumbstruck speechless if a coworker actually was brazen enough to just take my food and eat it. It's comically absurd.

I generally agree with what you're saying. It's kind of hilarious to me that so many people here don't know what "stealing" means. Have they not read the article at all? News flash: the act of stealing requires intention. Accidentally swiping someone's ambiguously-labeled lunch is very different!!

I think the issue is that it can be difficult to prove/disprove intent for something like stolen lunches unless there was a camera pointed at the fridge (or some other clear indicator) if you're going to fire someone over it and be protected against a wrongful termination suit.

It's a bit over the top to have that in place to enforce the policy unless it was a known issue in that workplace. So the statement the GP made seems a bit extreme without context.

Given enough time, someone who steals from coworkers will eventually steal from the company. Antisocial behavior isn't about the victims, it's about the behavior. They may say things like "I would never do that to YOU", but in the end, when it is to their advantage, they will do that to you.

Would you also fire someone who takes an office pen home? What about printing personal documents on the office printer?

Sure, they are all technically "stealing" stuff, but lighten up.

Completely different scenarios. Stealing an office pen is slightly immoral but basically affects no one. Stealing a lunch ruins someone's day, and is a direct insult to their time and existence. An absolute false equivalence and you know it.

Sure, taking someone's lunch is worse than stealing a pen, but firing them is overkill. The punishment does not fit the crime.

If you believe that theft is an isolated incident then sure. I'd argue that someone who steals a coworker's lunch is not a good person in other areas of their life.

Disagree. Anyone who steals someone else's lunch is a total arsehole, but I wouldn't class it as a firing offence.

For me it looks like HR is just trying to protect an essential/key employee of the company agains a new employee even if what has been done is unethical. Some employee may think that they can do anything because the company can't replace them.

Most companies would quickly have 0 employees if this was a universal policy

Really? You think that 100% of employees steal from their co-workers at some point? I guess I must be crazy because I've never done that, nor considered it.

I would certainly quit a company with a culture of dispensing harsh and summary justice.

And, while I agree that eating other people's lunch is unethical, we should be very wary of the "broken window" attitude towards lashing out severe punishment for minor things.

Very often it goes together with leniency towards CEOs "giving themselves" huge exit bonuses & so on.

...most companies really don't have employees eating each others' lunches, that's ridiculous. Where do you work where this is considered normal?

Well... at least one... You can't steal your own lunch.

The last two employees would eat eachother's lunch.

The issue is that the last employee has to have the moral integrity to fire himself.

Aha good answer to a potentially trick question!

I'm sorry, what? In what kind of company do you work where you would assume that even one colleague may steal your lunch?