WSJ on : people stealing forks and spoons from their workplace ..............................................
March 21, 2023
When You Come to a Fork in the Office Kitchen, Take It
As people head back to work, the cutlery is disappearing at an alarming rate; an ‘angry standoff’
Mike Williams made an audio story about what he called the scarcity of forks in lunchrooms across Australia.
By Rebecca Feng
As people return to workplaces all over the world, they’re discovering something else has disappeared -- the office cutlery.
At the London office of PEI Group, a global financial-media company, forks and teaspoons go missing at an alarming rate, said Nicola Williams, its office manager. She said she orders a new batch of roughly 100 new pieces of cutlery every six months to fill three communal drawers.
“I’ve sent out emails saying, ‘We’re missing quite a few forks,’ ” to no avail, said Ms. Williams, adding that her office has only 125 people working there during a good week.
An investigation yielded a confession of sorts. Product manager Jennifer Ta, who goes to the office once a week on Wednesdays, makes it a point to get in before her colleagues, “because everything in the kitchen is a hot commodity.” She immediately collects a mug, fork and teaspoon and puts them on her desk.
“I am not risking it,” she said, recalling the times she couldn’t find the items she needed. Ms. Ta admitted she has occasionally taken cutlery home, reasoning that she was simply replacing items that she brought in before and ended up losing.
Of course, communal items have gone missing from offices since the dawn of the cubicle. But these days another trend is merging with the back-to-the-office movement: the eco-conscious workspace. Nearly 60% of professionals in the U.S. and Canada said their workplaces made environmentally friendly changes in the past three years, according to a 2021 poll by Captivate, a digital-media network -- including substituting single-use plastic cutleries with reusable ones.
Governments are piling on. The New York City Council passed a “Skip the Stuff” law in January prohibiting restaurants from providing disposable utensils unless customers request it. California passed a similar law in late 2021. England is gearing up to ban any business from selling single-use plastic cutleries in October.
The green initiatives have provided fertile soil for an age-old problem -- as workers get ready to scarf down quinoa bowls, creamy chicken soup and pesto pasta salad, they may have to resort to using their fingers.
Ben Stiller, marketing director at the office of Canada’s National Truck League, calls himself the ‘fork police.’
At the office of Canada’s National Truck League, an insurance broker for the country’s trucking industry, marketing director Ben Stiller said the lunchroom usually has only spoons available, and no forks.
Mr. Stiller, who calls himself the “fork police,” said he emailed the whole office to highlight the issue and made a sign to shame “fork stealers” into returning them.
“They all came back, and then two weeks later, they were all gone again,” he said. “We never solved the problem.”
Mike Williams, a documentary and podcast producer in Sydney, Australia, said forks from his office in a previous job often ended up in his home after he left them in his lunchbox.
Around two years ago, Mr. Williams said his wife ordered him to return the 20 office forks that had accumulated in their kitchen drawer, as the mismatched cutlery was an eyesore. He said he didn’t want to be labeled as a thief if colleagues saw him with them, so he carried the cutlery in his bag for weeks before slipping the forks back into his office pantry when no one was around.
In December, Mr. Williams published an audio story called “Who Gives a Fork?” about what he called a “crisis facing lunchrooms across the country,” and aired what he did. He thinks the scarcity played a role in his behavior. “I used to walk halfway around the building looking for a fork,” he recalls. “When you get a fork, you inherently want to hold on to the fork,” he said.
There are plenty of spoons and knives, but only one fork at the National Truck League.
Some researchers have attempted to study the phenomenon. One paper published in 2020 in the Medical Journal of Australia found teaspoons marked with red nail lacquer disappeared more quickly than similarly marked forks in the staff tearoom of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, where the authors work. They noted, however, that the question of where the cutlery went remained unanswered. The researchers wrote that radio frequency identification chips might be a better way to keep track of the items’ whereabouts.
Mark Mattiussi, the hospital’s chief medical officer and lead author of the research, said he noticed that forks sometimes reappeared -- though they weren’t the same dotted ones that were part of the study. “That’s the phenomenon of the fork resurrection,” he added.
The hospital may have solved the problem, though: It now hands out biodegradable wood cutlery.
At Wellington Motor Freight in Toronto, Michael Zelek, who works in human resources, was at wits end. “I don’t really think it’s a theft issue or at least an intentional theft issue. It’s very perplexing. We have maybe 50 people in this office, you’d think it’d be easy to keep track of things, but the forks just kept going away,” he said.
Ten months ago, Mr. Zelek replenished the cutlery drawers with gold-colored forks, spoons and knives. The hope is that people who take the cutlery home by mistake will immediately recognize the items that stand out in their kitchen drawers and bring them back. He said he hasn’t had to replenish the office pantry drawer since.
Michael Zelek replenished the cutlery drawers with gold-colored forks, spoons and knives to prevent accidental thievery.
Pattrick Smellie, a co-founder and owner of BusinessDesk, a New Zealand-based publication, said he used to replenish a shared cutlery drawer every six months when his team occupied an office space together with other companies.
Once, there was an “angry standoff” with people in a business next door who accused his staffers of stealing their cutlery, he recalled. Mr. Smellie said he got all riled up and bought 48 new pieces -- and paid more than what they cost to engrave the word “stolen” on each item.
“It was a desperate move, but I thought maybe if I could label any person using those cutleries as a thief, that’d cut down the extent to which they were stolen,” said Mr. Smellie.
The “stolen” cutlery lasted longer, but eventually it also disappeared.
Write to Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com
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