I worked in a grocery warehouse of around 300 employees with an machine where you had to punch in a code for what department you were working in, 101 for dairy, 102 for fresh produce, 103 for cleaning etc. Our shift was done at 5AM but if we packed and shipped all the groceries for the stores the next day we had literally nothing to do. We got evaluated by how many orders we would pack per hour while clocked in on the specific codes so as soon as you weren't packing an order it was a rush to clock into the cleaning code otherwise your numbers would go down. We weren't allowed to take more breaks than our designated breaks, so once all the orders were packed people punched into the cleaning code and started cleaning. Clean-up took around 5-10 minutes. So if we were done at 4AM we had 50 minutes of nothing to do, what so ever.

All the bosses would actively go around and check if anyone was in the break room and get upset and rush us out to go cleaning. Which resulted in 300 employees pushing around brooms on a spotless floor with coffee in their hand in groups while talking for 50 minutes and no one had a problem with that.

Besides that our employer demanded everyone to try to be above the average of packed orders per hour. Being below the average was not acceptable and if you were below average for too long you would get called in for a talk. I once forgot to punch in on the cleaning code for 3 hours and as a result my weekly number plummeted. I got called in for a talk and my boss showed me my insanely low number for that week and i told him it was because i forgot to punch into the cleaning code. We use a electronic headset to say every single item we grab into so the employer can see a live feed of every single item we pick up at what second. So if he wanted he could see i didn't pack a single item for 3 hours but he didn't care. I then also tried to tell him how averages works and around half will always be below average. He got insanely pissed and just told me to strive to be better and be higher than the average. Of course this resulted in the average just kept getting higher and higher and people made more and more mistakes. We are talking 100+ gallons of milk, 1000+ eggs etc exploding on floors. But that meant people could punch into the cleaning code and take it chill while they cleaned up. We had a Zamboni sized vacuum that you could drive to suck up all the mess which was kinda fun too. The company didn't have any issue with that because the packed items per hour was raising.

Thankfully this is in a country where we have unions so there would often be strikes where everyone refused to work for sometimes 5-12 hours. This meant around 500.000 people in the area not getting groceries the next day.