Trillion-Dollar Company Meta Fires Employees Who Used $25 Meal Credit to Buy Groceries Instead: 'Surreal'

Meta, a company valued at 1.2 trillion, has allegedly fired employees over their reported misuse of the company's $25 meal credit system, according to a report.

The company, which provides employees meal credits through Grubhub or UberEats, reportedly fired 24 employees at their Los Angeles office after the employees used these meal credits to buy non-food grocery items such as toothpaste and laundry detergent, according to the Financial Times.

Employees also allegedly further abused the company's meal credit system by ordering food to their homes when they were not at work.

Some of the workers were questioned about the breach as part of a human resources investigation, losing their livelihoods after admitting to contributing to it. Employees that misused the meal credit system repeatedly were let go, while others that only misused it a couple times were reprimanded and retained their positions, reported the Financial Times.

One unnamed worker who was reportedly fired was making an annual salary of $400,000. They lost their job after using the $25 meal credit to purchase toothpaste and tea.

"On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit," an ex-employee of the company wrote to the anonymous social media platform Bind.

Meta has recently cracked down on employees, with the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, ordering 21,000 redundancies in the years 2022 and 2023. The company, which frequently provides free food to employees, also received backlash for shifting the beginning of its Silicon Valley campus free dinner service to 6:30 p.m.