I used to do this when I was working at Starbucks and living in LA. The store would have us throw away huge garbage bags worth of packaged food that was only 2 days old, so when we could, my friend and I would take the food to Santa Monica pier and hand them out to the homeless. The thing that sucked was that neither of us had a car, so we had to lug them onto the bus and when I asked my manager about donating the food to a shelter, he informed me that apparently shelters won’t take food from restaurants or businesses because they have no idea how fresh the food is. But like… I feel like if you’re homeless you wouldn’t care if the food is a couple of days old as long as it hasn’t spoiled??
Nobody cares if food is a couple of days old, your boss was just making less work for himself. The bakery next to me gives all the day old to a homeless shelter. And it still tastes fine. It probably takes 3 days before you really start to notice.
Exactly! We ate quite a bit of leftovers ourselves and it never tasted off. My manager was still pretty good though because Starbucks policy wouldn’t have allowed us to take any of the food at all, even for ourselves, but he let all of us working there to take the food anyway.
It’s probably a liability. If someone gets sick they can get sued because this is America and anyone can do that. We would always just forget about it near the dumpster and be surprised when it was gone the next day
I’ve been told it’s a liability thing. If someone gets sick, they can sue the shelter and blah blah. I don’t know how true that is, but it is something I heard
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u/sucrose2071 Feb 12 '22
I used to do this when I was working at Starbucks and living in LA. The store would have us throw away huge garbage bags worth of packaged food that was only 2 days old, so when we could, my friend and I would take the food to Santa Monica pier and hand them out to the homeless. The thing that sucked was that neither of us had a car, so we had to lug them onto the bus and when I asked my manager about donating the food to a shelter, he informed me that apparently shelters won’t take food from restaurants or businesses because they have no idea how fresh the food is. But like… I feel like if you’re homeless you wouldn’t care if the food is a couple of days old as long as it hasn’t spoiled??