I stole thousands of dollars in change over 2 years working at McDonalds - when they asked me about it, I came clean and was spared prosecution but not my job

At the time I was in high school and my junior year I got a job at McDonalds. I did a little bit of everything but mostly worked in the back doing food prep. My sophomore year of high school my dad had a stroke and lost the ability to do his job. It threw a huge kink in our finances and forced us to move into a crappy apartment that was within walking distance of the McDonalds so I could get to work. My mom was working at a gas station on the second shift so I was alone a lot. <br><br>One of my friends worked with me in the kitchen and he told me one day about a former employee who had gotten in a lot of trouble for taking a full bag of change and using it to buy a car. He hadn’t gotten in trouble with the law, but had been blackballed from working at any McDonalds in the area so that was his punishment. <br><br>I decided to test it out. Every time I dumped a bin of dirty dishes I filled my apron pockets with a handful of change and stuck it in the dumpster behind the restaurant. I did it every day for about two years and it wasn’t until I got a promotion to front of house that I stopped. <br><br>Nobody ever found out about it and I estimate over the 2 years I took around $6,000. After I turned 18 I moved out and bought a car with the money. <br><br>A few years later a district manager was hired who changed the type of coin I had been taking. I’m assuming he knew that the amount of change that McDonalds was keeping on hand wasn’t adding up and so he switched from quarters to nickels. So instead of someone reaching in and getting 10s or 20s in change, they were getting significantly less.<br><br>A few weeks after that I got called into the office and 3 district managers were in there. One was my manager, the other was the new manager (who I didn’t know his name was) and there was another guy who had been a district manager for years. He asked me if I knew why I was being talked to and I said no. He told me that they had been counting the change at the end of the night and the total wasn’t right. He asked if I had ever taken anything and I said no. <br><br>I lied to them because I was so nervous and I was almost 21, I didn’t want to throw away my future and get in trouble with the law. <br><br>He asked me again and I said no, not realizing he had already caught me in a lie. He sighed and told me that he knew I had taken money from them and that they knew exactly how much I had taken. <br><br>At that point I just didn’t care. I was so nervous and I didn’t want to throw everything away so I told them the truth. I told them everything about how I took the money, about why and about how I had used it. <br><br>I offered to pay it back and they said they didn’t want the money but that they just wanted me gone. They called the police and had me taken away in handcuffs. I was charged with some sort of felony theft and had to go to court. <br><br>The district manager that I had gotten along with was the only one to show up to my court hearing. He told the judge that he didn’t want me to get in trouble for this and that he wanted me to be given another chance. The judge told me I was very lucky to have come out of this unscathed and I agreed with him. I had expected to go to jail and have a felony on my record but I ended up with nothing.<br><br>My mom was very disappointed in me but also glad that I hadn’t gotten in worse trouble. My dad never even knew because his stroke had damaged part of his brain and he was incapable of understanding what I told him. <br><br>I still work in the fast food industry and I’m a manager at a restaurant chain now. I still take money but it’s not coins, and not thousands of dollars.