I know that “past the best-by date” doesn’t necessarily mean “unsafe” or illegal to sell. And to be fair, most of what I’m talking about is canned/jarred sort of stuff that probably is pretty decent for a good amount of time after the best-by date.
But…
I used to do my regular shopping at the place within walking distance of my house, but they had kindof a scandal and were terribly mismanaged and just within the last few years, it became clear it was no longer safe to eat food from there. (Not just “past its best-by date”, though that definitely started happening. “Fresh” produce isn’t fresh and smells terrible already on the shelf, cheese is moldy on the shelf even when it isn’t past its date, etc.) They’re still open (they do have the advantage of being the closest grocery store to a big highway for folks driving through/near my town not familiar enough with my town to know better) but it’s very clear that their customer base has shrunk drastically and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the whole chain closed or sold or some such in the near-ish future. Before they went down hill, I don’t think I’d ever really seen anything on the shelf that was past the best-by date at that store or any other. Maybe extremely infrequently at most, and it was usually because something was obviously “lost” somehow. Kicked under a display case or way in the back of the shelf in the wrong section of the store behind stuff that stays stocked up or some such.
So I switched my regular shopping routine to the fancy new grocery store a little bit further away. (This location was built within the last 5 years and I started shopping there pretty exclusively about 2 or 3 years ago.) It’s fairly ritzy. (There was a time when I would have called the other store “ritzy” as well.) But tons of stuff is past its best-by date on the shelves. Dry/powdered spices, condiments (hot sauces in particular), jarred pickled stuff, etc. All months or sometimes years past their best-by dates. But even the things that aren’t already past their best-by dates are hard to get with a decent best-by or expiration date. Milk in particular is often hard to find with an expiration date more than a week out (and usually milk does start to taste off like a day or two after that expiration date at most), so I tend to buy it in quarts.
(I also know there are stores dedicated to dumping substandard/old food on poorer communities for a lower price. But I really don’t think that’s a factor here.)
I dunno. Just seems weird compared to my previous experience to see things on the store shelves already past their best-by date. Do you folks avoid buying things from the grocery store that are past their best-by dates?
I’m in the U.S. midwest if that makes a difference. And I wonder if the fucking tariffs might be a big factor in that. Maybe keeping things on the shelf past their best-by dates is a way to reduce the costs for the store while they’re having to pay a lot more for goods, allowing them to pass the cost on to consumers partially in the form of lower-quality, less fresh food so they can reduce how much of the cost they pass on to customers in the form of prices going up.
Or maybe this has always been more common than I realized and I’ve just gotten more observant more recently. 🤷
Edit: Ok, I’ll name and shame. I guess I only avoided doing so to avoid doxing myself, but yeah. The first store I mentioned that is just terrible is a Price Cutter location. The second store is a HyVee.
Here in Europe I haven’t noticed any change to the worse.
This is often a symptom of a razor-thin labour budget. Management tends to view rotation as a cost, and any cost that can be ignored probably will be.
If the milk is off so quickly past the best-by date, I’d imagine they’re having trouble with either the fridges not keeping temperature, or literally stocking the shelves in a timely fashion. I’ve been places where pallets of frozen food keep getting taken out of the freezer and can sit out for hours while it’s being worked. I’ve had management tell me it’s fine as long as it’s less than four hours - the generally accepted safe maximum time limit - and they fail to realize that’s a cumulative time per product.
Here’s a complaint form. Apparently Hy-vee is employee-owned, so they might actually care to do something about that.
Apparently Hy-vee is employee-owned
From what I’ve heard from former employees of employee-owned grocery stores, it sounds like “employee-owned” can often be an “on paper”, kind of technicality that bolsters their image marketing-wise/PR-wise while not actually being true in practice.
A former employee of the Price Cutter location I was talking about, when I asked about Price Cutter being worker-owned (it says so in a sign on the door as you walk in), told me that the union there was completely captured/controlled by the upper management. Like, the vice president had full veto power over what the union decided. (And why TF would a truly “employee-owned” company have/need a union. So you can collectively bargain with yourselves, the collective owners?) In practice, the union was kindof just to give employees some degree of illusion that they weren’t just wage slaves. And maybe to make creating a real union seem less feasible to employees. And maybe there are meetings that employees can attend and theoretically vote on things or whatever, but in practice, the attendees who vote don’t actually have any sway over the direction of the company or conditions for workers or anything.
Not to say I’m not filing a complaint. It probably can’t hurt to do so. But I don’t think “it’s employee-owned” is actually necessarily any reason to think results might be better than if it didn’t say “employee-owned” on the website, unfortunately.
That’s a bummer. The industry gets by on misrepresenting its product, so I guess that doesn’t really surprise me
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:
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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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Well, I mean, we cut a quarter million jobs from the federal government including bureaucrats who ensured our food was safe, so it’s not particularly surprising to me to hear there’s more unsafe food available for purchase.
I’ve noticed an uptick in my area of the US. My personal experience is that it got more common after covid, maybe got slightly less common for a while, and has gotten more common in the last year or so.
It may be I just check them more frequently when other food safety concerns are in the news. But I’ve also noticed an uptick in other supply issues in grocery stores, items being out of stock more often for example. Perishables especially. Those two things feel like they might co-occur.
I shop almost exclusively at Costco or a local co-op because all the stuff on the regular grocery store (always some version of Kroger) shelves is usually right at its sell date or very close, this is new in my area, things that used to have 6 - 8 months of shelf stable time pantry goods have a month left when I see them in the store, which defeats the purpose of me keeping a deep pantry. So I do less bargain shopping and just do big Costco runs when I can and get fresh stuff at the co-op in between
In the stores I worked at for 24 years, that role was the first to get axed with budget cuts
Edit: As several others have stated, I now see
Products in general food and othewise have been worse i the last year or two in my and my wifes perspective since we talk about it grabbing a piece of produce or whatnot and going over to each other like WTF!
Hmm… I know a certain grocery store chain that got acquired by a bigger store a few years back, that’s located in the Midwest, and has been having a significant issue with leaving expired items on the shelves…
But no I don’t think its normal. Its very likely margins getting thinner because everything and management or the owners trying to keep the numbers looking good.
According to the USDA, “sell-by”, “use-by”, “freeze-by”, and “best if used by/before” dates are all indicators of quality, not safety. Except for infant formula, nothing is required to be dated by federal regulations, and an item being past its date does not necessarily imply spoilage, just a loss of quality.
You may want to check with your state and local governments to see if there are any more specific rules that would apply in your location.
Anything being sold in my local stores past its best befre date is usually in the discount bin. My daughter works at one of them and regularly gets to bring home stuff that’s past date but still good because it can’t be sold. This is in Canada though, our laws are a bit stiffer than the US.
lol. What kind of third world country are you in?
Trumplandia. :\
It’s always been common at certain stores. I don’t shop at those places. It does seem to be spreading, though.
Why don’t you grab someone who works there and tell them and show them in all detail, and steal them the full 20 minutes it took you to write all this down (and I didn’t read, because it makes no difference).
If several people would do that every day in every one of their stores, they would rethink their policies for sure.
Why don’t you grab someone who works there and tell them…
Because I want to keep shopping there and don’t want everyone there to hate me. Plus I’m conflict averse. If I was going to complain, I’d probably try to do so as anonymously as I can.
(And I’m talking about the second location – the HyVee. The Price Cutter’s done for. I really don’t think there’s any hope for them.)
I do the shopping, and I can’t say I’ve ever noticed this.
