Ford Fired a Diabetic Worker for “Stealing” a $2 Cookie … That He Actually Paid For

In early May, a 60-year-old, diabetic career electrician working an overnight shift at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville went to the plant’s self-checkout food and drink kiosk to buy a cookie. Kurt Kromm had received a warning that his blood sugar was low, so he needed a quick pick-me-up before getting back to work. The 11-year veteran of the Ford truck plant paid $2 for his snack at a check-out kiosk and went on with his shift. He thought nothing more about it until he was called into a meeting with a supervisor a week later, where they were joined by his UAW union bargainer. According to Kromm, the union rep then laid this on him: “They’re going to terminate you. They got you on video stealing a cookie.”

The following absurd story of short-sighted corporate obstinance (and crappy union representation) comes to us courtesy of a report in a Substack called Shifting Gears by auto industry journalist Phoebe Wall Howard, and it is a doozy. It involves one of the country’s largest auto manufacturers going out of its way to destroy a long relationship with a very valuable employee for no good reason, being forced to compensate that employee, and making a public fool of itself, all because it seemingly didn’t even bother to check receipts or verify that the employee had committed the most insignificant infraction imaginable. The suspected loss of a $2 cookie, in the eyes of the Ford Motor Company, was worth losing an employee it had spent untold amounts of money training over the course of 11 years, including a role as a member of the plant’s Emergency Rescue Team. They didn’t even allow the guy to collect his tools before he was escorted off the property.

Keep a few things in mind, here. First of all, we are talking about a highly skilled, highly paid worker. As Kromm himself put it to Shifting Gears, “I earned over $200,000 last year. Why would I steal? I spent $1,200 last year in the canteen mainly on Diet Cokes.” He worked more than 60 hours a week on average at the plant in 2025, producing Ford Super Duty, Ford Expedition SUV and Lincoln Navigator SUVs, vehicles that retail from $60,000-$100,000 on average. The plant in general is one of the country’s largest, employing more than 8,000 workers and generating $25 billion in revenue. But they were still punishingly anal retentive enough to leap into action at the threat of a stolen $2 cookie.

Imagine you spend your overnight shifts building $80,000 trucks, only to lose it all over a single “stolen” cookie.

How did this happen, you will naturally wonder? It all seemingly boils down to a momentarily faulty swipe of a debit card at a payment kiosk. The diabetic Kromm, toiling in his overnight shift, said he felt light-headed, so he went in search of sugar at the canteen. He attempted to pay for his $2 cookie at the payment kiosk, only for the machine from food services company Aramark to say it had failed to process the transaction–an issue that employees at the plant told Shifting Gears was frequent and widely understood. But it was no problem for Kromm at the time, because the break room had a second payment kiosk–he simply paid at the second one, ate his cookie, and went on with his shift. The case against Kromm, meanwhile, was seemingly based entirely on video footage captured of the first kiosk, in which it can be seen flashing red rather than the green mark that would have confirmed payment. Ford simply failed to consider that Kromm could have paid at the other kiosk in the same room before they accused him of cookie theft and showed him the door, refusing to listen to what should have been an instantly understandable explanation.

Making matters worse was the fact that Kromm’s union rep, who one would expect to be incensed by such petty accusations against a long-time employee, instead reportedly urged Kromm to confess and apologize for something he hadn’t done. As Shifting Gears put it:

To this day, Kromm cannot process the idea that his union rep urged him to apologize for something he didn’t do. “These people appease the company. I was at Chrysler for 12 years, and my building chairman Curt Wilson would’ve knocked someone upside the head and said, ‘This is absurd.’ But the (Ford) union kept saying, ‘People go back sooner and have better luck if they’re apologetic.'”

Nor did Ford care that Kromm could easily prove that he had paid for his $2 cookie. All it took was him going home and checking his account statements to see the charge from Aramark, showing that he had paid. But the company that fired him after employing him for 11 years took nearly a month to even contract Aramark for verification of this. And despite Kromm sending in images of his debit card transactions, the company replied to him saying that he needed to submit copies of his bank statements that were notarized, in order to prove that he wasn’t somehow faking those as well.

“I’m thinking, this is the way my career at Ford Motor is going to end?,” said Kromm. “There’s no way I’m coming back. First you tell me I’m a thief and then you tell me I’m a liar for saying I didn’t steal. They were so confident I’d stolen. And then I look in my checking account statement and the $1.95 is frickin’ there.”

It’s obviously asking far too much for a company like Ford to genuinely care about the wellbeing of its employees, and apparently asking too much for Kromm’s union there to effectively stand up for him, but you would think that the company making such a publicly visible blunder, and both the subsequent bad press and the money wasted on the loss of a valuable employee–not to mention the threat of a wrongful termination lawsuit–would make Ford take notice of how disastrously its anti-labor adherence to such a policy was impacting the company. This is, suffice to say, not good business! But in its short statement from Ford spokeswoman Jessica Enoch, the closest the company came to saying “we screwed up” was the acknowledgement that “there are times when we look into things and realize it could have been handled different.” Oh, you think?

Ford fired an 11-year employee over alleged non-payment for a $1.95 Grandma’s Chocolate Chip Cookie.

He was making $200K a year and had spent $1,200 in the cafeteria over the previous year.

They tried to rehire him, but he found a better-paying job.👏🏾💪🏾

economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-upd…

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— Sura Mbaya (@surambaya.bsky.social) 9:00 AM · Jul 5, 2026

More than a month after being fired, the objections and evidence had finally become too much for Ford to ignore. In late June, the company sent Kromm checks for five weeks of lost wages, and formally offered him his job back. He refused thanks to the disrespect he experienced, instead finding a new job in his hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He had spent the last 11 years regularly commuting between the two, renting a Louisville, Kentucky apartment. He now makes more money while no longer needing to regularly travel. Still, he said he would rather have just continued on in the job he enjoyed, up until the moment his employer suddenly stabbed him in the back for no good reason.

“Looking back, I just think that I would have been happy to pay for that cookie again, just pay for it twice,” he said. “I liked the people I worked with. I think we made a great product. If I could somehow go back two months and just avoid this, I would. I was very happy doing what I was doing. I liked working at Ford.”

The incident leading to Kurt Kromm’s firing was so absurd and tone deaf, one has to wonder if the company is simply welcoming such instances as justified excuses they can use to fire a union worker, presumably to then bring in a more inexpensive, less experienced replacement. Indeed, one of the plant’s other employees, 34-year Ford electrician Victoria Thomas, a friend of Kromm’s, told Shifting Gears that she knew other workers who had been terminated under the same type of theft accusations, and that she has also experienced the Aramark machines glitching.

“You’ll turn around and want your receipt and you can’t get one,” Thomas said. “It acts like it’s declining or won’t process and then it sometimes does. I’d know it went through because my bank Navy Federal would show on the phone when I made a purchase. But the payment kiosk would say it’s not processed and asking me to scan my card again. People have even tried to reach out to Aramark to say, ‘The machine took my money.’ I don’t want an issue so I avoid that room. I have friends who were terminated because they bought a $2 drink. Kurt was the only one who had documentation and he fought it.”

It’s such a powerfully dystopian story, to lose a valued, high-earning job because you happen to be employed by an uncaring, robotic mega-corporation that is so laser focused on its self-imposed business strictures, that it’s entirely incapable of actually considering the human stories of the employees who make its billions in revenue possible. This all happened because of a single cookie. A cookie! The minutia of the supposed infraction that drove such a consequential decision in this man’s life cannot be overstated. He understandably can’t get over it himself.

“They said they had zero tolerance for theft, and that this has happened to five people they’ve had to terminate,” Kromm said. “I looked at my rep and said, ‘Really? Are you shitting me?’ I said, ‘If you wanted to get rid of me, you could’ve just asked. I’d quit. Why are you doing this over a cookie?'”

Why indeed? How many cookies is the average employee’s life worth, to the likes of Ford? How many cookies would it take to cost you your own job? What happens if, god forbid, you accidentally don’t pay for a muffin? Does a SWAT team come and abduct your entire family? On the plus side, we now have a new measuring stick for job security: Would your employer/bosses fire you over a $2 cookie, or do you work for people who view you as a human being?