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Comment on Is it just the norm now-a-days for grocery stores to have lots of stuff on the shelves that's past the best-by date?

NathanDerWeise@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Insight from someone who used to work in retail. Also, my husband currently works at a grocery store. In fact, he regularly gets asked to travel to other locations to find and discard out of date food.

There are two main factors to food on shelves being in date:

It needs to be stocked properly. That is to say, old stuff needs to be pulled to the front, and new stuff needs to be put behind it. It’s worth noting here that the correct way is more difficult than the easy way (just putting new stuff in front).
You need employees to regularly check items on the shelves to ensure they are still in date.

And that’s really it. You’re noticing more out of date stuff, because every major retail store in the country is cutting staff to save money. You cut staff, and what you are left with is fewer employees who aren’t as well trained. They cut corners while stocking, and they do not have enough time to properly check dates later either.

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TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

old stuff needs to be pulled to the front

Yeah, the stuff I’m talking about is always the front unit on the shelf. I can’t always be arsed to search behind the front one for fresher units, but when I do, usually the entire stock on the shelf of that particular product is expired all the way to the back of the shelf. So I don’t really think that’s the issue in my case. I might be more vigilant about searching behind the frontmost unit in the future, though.

every major retail store in the country is cutting staff to save money

Yeah, this store clearly has huge turnover as well. Probably not uncommon to see in grocery stores in general, but I think it’s worse here than other stores. The checkout clerks, for instance, often times have to ask for help for things like “how do I ring up the gallon drinking water refills” or whatever. (Which, of course, isn’t the clerk’s fault at all.)

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igmelonh@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Yeah, I worked grocery for a couple years and we were instructed to do that, but we were also constantly understaffed and discouraged from taking the time to do so, so it often was only done on products whose sell by dates were within a couple months of receiving (dressings and the like).

I vividly recall discovering one night that my coworkers hadn’t been doing this for our coffee section, and my acting manager was a tad passive-aggressive when he found that I’d spent about 30 minutes stuffing over 100 bags of coffee beans into boxes so it could be tossed (or given to a discount store or whatever). Some of the bags were 5 years out of date.

This has led to me checking the dates of every perishable I pick up at the store.

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communism@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

old stuff needs to be pulled to the front, and new stuff needs to be put behind it

As an aside, my “not unethical but does feel a bit like you’re cheating other people” life tip is to rummage around at the back of the shelf/in the bottom crate of a stack of crates for the freshest food. Don’t feel too bad about it especially in a high-turnover shop. They were going to sell the most recent-dated stock anyway, just to somebody who’s not you.

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