School Lunch Fraud

[Major_Malfunction]

The Domino’s I work at has a contract with the local school district to provide about 1200 slices a week to its federally-funded school lunch program. As I’m sure most of you know, the law requires that we use a special type of lowfat/reduced calorie cheese. I have been led to believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that this cheese is subsidized by the Department of Agriculture. The manager of my store misuses this cheese on a regular basis. On several occasions we have run out of our regular cheese due to his incompetence and have used the school cheese in its place instead of closing the store. Once we ran out of cheese at 6:00 on a Saturday night and used over 100 pounds of the school cheese in order to keep the operation going. In other instances the manager has determined that he has more school cheese on hand than he needs to fulfill his obligation to the district and has mixed the excess 50/50 with the regular cheese and used it for normal customer fill. I reported this to a criminal investigator with the USDA, but got the typical law enforcement response: “thanks for bringing this to our attention. “We will forward it to the appropriate division office for an evaluation, and you will hear from us when Hell freezes over.†I can’t go to the owner because he will just sweep it under the rug and make my life miserable. So that just leaves the franchisor. If I go to Domino’s with this information, are they going to care? Will they take any action?

 

[Rick_G]

First find out if the cheese is subsidized and if, in fact, what they are doing is illegal and/or immoral. If it is, and you feel strongly about it, and apparently you do, report it to the corporate office. Inform them you notified USDA and inform USDA that you notified corporate. That is the right thing to do because your store is ripping off the government if the cheese is subsidized for a specific application but diverted for retail sales. I have no love for Dominos but it i the right thing to do.
If the cheese is not subsidized or otherwise limited to use for school lunch only by the USDA then it is a non issue other than the manager not putting out the approved product which is not illegal but may upset Domino’s Corporate peoples day. I would not risk my job over a manager substituting an an available product in place of an unavailable approved product.
If they are in fact knowingly breaking the law find yourself another job! The manager, and franchisee will both resent your involvement in this matter. They are apparently both willing to color outside of the lines. Depending on the state you reside in they may or may not be able to get rid of you right away but if they can not get rid of you they can make you unhappy.
Do what you believe is the correct and moral thing to do so your consience is clear and have a back up plan for employment if it blows up in your face.

Just my opinion and sometimes I am wrong so follow my advice at your own risk.

Rick

 

[RobT]

Dominos sures hell would care…

Don’t they have to buy all their supplies from corporate?
I’m sure the franchise is buying it 3rd party, and i’m pretty sure they are violating their contract agreement.

 

[paul7979]

Don’t expect any resolution from the government in regards to Dominos. There are government agencies with their arms wrapped around Dominos stroking what little they can find. Here’s an article about 12 million of our tax dollars being spent DIRECTLY marketing Dominos pizzas by the USDA. Credit given to pizza2007 for this article, but the link he provided is no longer showing the text.

http://www.witn.com/news/headlines/USDA … 44664.html

It’s hard to imagine the same government agency thats giving Dominos a 12 million dollar reach around will care if Dominos is wasting a few hundred pounds of government cheese.

 

[pizza2007]

Paul,

You bring up an excellent point. What drives me nutz about this “whole” topic, is that the government is SUBSIDIZING a huge corporation that gives them an almost unbeatable bidding position for local government contracts while leaving local small business owners out in the COLD. Grossly unfair and I should think ILLEGAL - which begs the question of how the other big corporations have dealt with the issue???