Good ol' Tim's (Tim Horton's) seems a little aggressive to it's employees. There are two fairly public cases in recent history. The older happened nine years ago when a worker named Charlene Walsh was caught on a security camera stealing two dollars from the cash register. She was fired.

However, the camera did not catch her stealing. It apparently only caught her removing two dollars from the till. The two dollars was a tip. Think 8 customers give 25 cents so you change them for $2, or a single customer gives a fiver for a three dollar order.

She was reinstated after a court case and then went on to try to get $10M in damages, which for good reason she did not get.

The next one was about an employee in Ontario who gave away a free timbit to a crying child. She was also fired for giving away free food and later re-instated after some bad PR.

For sure these are only two examples out of the many thousands of employees working for Tim Horton's, so it doesn't seem to be anything extreme.

I look at these examples as a demonstration that employees in general, and in fact the weaker party in any inequal relationship, how the weaker side can be treated. First, these crimes are so unbelievably small that I can't imagine they warrant a firing. To the employee their job could be their means of survival. To the company it is $2 or a twenty cent doughnut hole. The costs of the action are far more drastic to the employee.

Second, the company needs to do some diligence. Sure the company doesn't owe anyone a job, but it can't call people thieves when they're not. Yet some over-zealous bosses are willing to take such actions without taking the effort to contemplate or investigate. Like a bully who needs no greater reason than that they just doesn't fancy your looks.

To some extent I understand how management can act this way. You can't tolerate theft from employees so these guys probably had some zero-tolerance policy in place. The supervisor probably came into the situation fresh from being motivated by the owner, or maybe it was the owner who had just totalled up him monthly "shrinkage" (employees or customers stealing). They made the snap executive decision to ruin a reputation and possibly a livelihood over $2.

I guess everyone makes mistakes and they ought to be forgiven. The sad thing to me is that it happens. I would hope that people in power wield that power charitably, using it for good rather than evil. Maybe there has to be some collateral damage, innocent lives lost to make a statement to the bigger thieves out there.