What to do when your colleagues keep stealing your lunch

EVERY office has them: the sticky-fingered colleagues who help themselves to food stashed in the communal fridge. One worker came up with a creative solution.

Lunch stealing is a plague.

NONE of her co-workers will ’fess up to the crime, but one of them stole Noelle Mulholland’s lunch.

The burrito in question — a perfect mix of pulled pork, green chile queso, salsa verde, romaine, crispy tortilla strips, and manchego and Monterey Jack cheeses that the 25-year-old account executive goes gaga over — seemingly vanished from the office fridge and into thin air.

The only evidence that it ever existed was the bag that Ms Mulholland had used to carry it between purveyor Mexicue in New York City’s trendy NoMad, and Phear Creative, the Flatiron-based ad agency where she works.

“I was so angry when I opened the refrigerator and my burrito wasn’t there,” the Queens resident told the New York Post.

She immediately fired off an email to the entire company, even upper management, writing: “There was a burrito I placed in the refrigerator no less than one hour ago and it is missing. Please return it, or let me know if you’ve thrown it out. Would like to eat it. This is not a joke, I am very serious and very hungry. On the verge of hangry.”

Hangry.

An overreaction? It doesn’t seem to be. Food theft in the workplace is epidemic. A survey released in June by online grocer Peapod revealed that 71 per cent of employees have had their personal snack, drink or meal stolen out of communal-office kitchens.

Not only that, but in urban areas, 40 per cent of employees admitted to having been the perpetrators of lunch theft.

You can count John, a software engineer who works at an investment bank near Wall Street, in the latter group.

He admitted to reaching into the refrigerators of his employers and snacking on other people’s things — sandwiches, cupcakes, eggplant Parmesan, even leftover Chinese — somewhat regularly.

“If it’s after 5pm and the person has gone home, it’s fair game,” argued the food thief, who asked his last name not be used so his eating habits could go undisturbed.

He defended his habit by pointing out that day-old food is gross, and said he left things that did not perish as quickly — such as soda, yoghurt and apples — alone.

Fair game or outright theft?

But this sort of laissez-faire attitude and assumed tolerance is wrong, according to popular relationship and etiquette expert April Masini.

“Many people who swipe food from the communal fridge assume it’s no big deal. It’s just a pastry — nobody is going to die if I eat your cheese danish, right? Do we really have to invoke death in the same sentence as a cheese danish? Just because you’re cool with stealing a danish, it doesn’t mean the rightful danish owner is okay with it,” she said.

Even if your food-scavenging ways are a result of actual hunger, “that’s no excuse,” said Nan DeMars, author of You’ve Got to Be Kidding: How to Keep Your Job Without Losing Your Integrity.

“While stealing a hoagie is not as egregious as robbing a bank, it’s still stealing,” she said. “And the fact that you can get away with it doesn’t make it lesser a crime.”

While Ms Mulholland never did find out for sure who nabbed her burrito, Jacqueline Whitmore, founder and director of the Florida-based Protocol School of Palm Beach, said it was normal to want to nail the person yourself.

“But don’t become the kitchen cop,” she warned. “You’ll only be creating trouble for yourself.”

SMILE, YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA

This is something that Ted, who wouldn’t share his last name for professional reasons, learned the hard way.

While working at a large pharmaceutical firm in New Jersey a few years ago, he put up a nanny cam in the company kitchen to find out who was nabbing his meals. When management discovered it, they fired him.

He could have taken up the matter with corporate security, of course, but it would have been another bad idea, said Ms Whitmore.

“So someone ate your sandwich,” she said philosophically. “It’s not the end of the world.”

The best way to avoid having your lunch stolen in the first place? Prevention.

Some companies — such as Shutterstock in Hell’s Kitchen — have minimised the need for employees to resort to thievery by offering prepared gourmet lunches at no cost, as well as kitchens stocked with food options ranging from bananas, apples, oatmeal and hummus to Cheetos and gluten-free snacks, plus sodas, juices and energy drinks.

Razia Ferdousi-Meyer, head of global facilities and operations at Shutterstock, said food theft was not an issue in his office, in contrast to other places she had worked.

“There’s always something good and interesting and satisfying available,” she said.

The other option is to eat out every day, which can be costly. If you want to continue brown-bagging your leftovers, experts advise making your meal as personal as possible to ward off co-workers with empty stomachs and sticky fingers.

“Get a cute travel bag, make your food look like it belongs to someone,” Ms Whitmore advised. And if someone walks in, they’ll find the thief holding a pretty, personalised pink bag that clearly doesn’t belong to them.

“At the very least, put your name on your stuff,” Ms DeMars said. “That way when someone goes to swipe it they’ll realise that they are stealing from a person with a name and a face versus someone anonymous.”

And if it’s a constant problem, you can always pack a refrigerated lunch box and keep it at your desk — or just pack something less enticing.

This article first appeared at the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as What to do when your colleagues keep stealing your lunch