This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Smoaktreess on 2024-12-18 06:37:29+00:00.

This happened a few years ago but I saw another post and it reminded of this story.

So I used to work overnight at a grocery store (think similar to Walmart) stocking shelves. We were supposed to follow planagrams which would basically just tell you where things were supposed to go on the shelves to keep all the stores uniform.

Like every year, we started receiving large amounts of Halloween candy. Instead of putting it in the normal candy aisle, we had a seasonal section where it would go. No problem but it wouldn’t fit. And it wouldn’t fit up in the steel where we would keep overfill product.

My manager and I looked in the candy aisle and saw it was pretty wiped out without any of the usual items to stock. So he told me to just put the Halloween candy in there and make it look nice. For the next couple nights, I noticed it was selling really well.

Day three or four, the store director came in early and pulled me aside and basically berated me for stocking things outside of the planagram and not following procedure. I tried to explain but he didn’t want to listen.

Fine, cue malicious compliance. My manager and I spent two hours removing everything that didn’t belong in the aisle and rearranging it. There was probably 10-15 missing products that just left an empty spot in the shelves. It looked terrible. We took all the extra candy and just parked it in the back since there was no where to put it. Oh well not our problem.

Came in the next night and he had written a note saying ‘please fill in all holes in candy aisle’. My manager wrote back ‘sorry, can’t. No product in store according to planagram’

Came in the next night and the day people had put all the candy back where I had it in the aisles. Store manager never complained about the way we stocked again for the next year I worked there.