When I was a teenager I bought several items and one of them was a bottle of wine (yes! that was back when you could still buy alcohol as a kid! N.B. it wasn’t for me). At the cash register just before I paid I dropped the bottle of wine and it shattered. One of the clerks asked me if I already paid. On hearing no, the person went to fetch a new bottle because technically it was still the supermarket’s property.
3rd option? don’t waste food unnecessarily pick it up and keep it?
Does the yes option mean pay for it but throw it away anyway?
Come on, it hit the floor in front of a bakery case, not the middle of the dust bin. My local Meijer is pretty clean, not spotless mind you, but dust it off and keep it is an option…
think about how many babies or old people (sorry babies and old people) are drooling into the produce or grimy hands picking over the lettuce greens? Not too mention the the little flockk of sparrows that fly about the store, eventually landing somewhere and pooping too inside the store…(wash your canned goods…) you have no idea what goes on behind closed doors
So a bagel escapes the bin and bounces on the floor, not like it’s spoiled rotten eh?
I vote no. It was an accident. I’d consider it an offset for all the times I’ve bought a gallon of milk and had it spoil three days before its expiration or bought an apple that turned out to be mushy.
Well, if it was yours I’d hardly expect you to pay the store for it 
Anyway that’s weird logic. In general if you accidentally destroy someone else’s property saying “it isn’t mine” isn’t really an acceptable way to get out of compensating them for the damage.
In my case unless the store was negligent in some ridiculous way I would be happy to pay for the thing that I broke, but I’d expect any supermarket to decline the offer.
But generally when you destroy someone’s property, you pay what it would cost to replace it, not what they could have sold it for. So if the grocery store spent ten cents producing a bagel, I can see an argument that I owe them ten cents, but not $1.25 or whatever. Especially if they normally expect to throw away a few bagels at days’ end, anyway: they aren’t even losing the opportunity to sell it to someone else.
If you dropped it, you should buy it. Don’t put it back
According to the following article (two law professors were consulted) the existence of such a sign is considered a contract. I assume that might not be true for all states, but that’s just an assumption.
This. Always. When one ruins something that belongs to someone else, there should always be an offer to make the owner whole, whether the owner is a person or a business.
Is this a woosh? I figured you were kidding about washing canned items, but … 
I would most likely buy it and eat it.
is that a wooshable topic? 
as a matter of fact i do rinse or wipe off the lids of containers especially if looking dusty. Have you never heard of house sparrows taking up residence in big box stores?
Note, sometimes i do pick bagels up off the floor and eventually eat them too.
Buy it, then eat it.
Did you subsequently keep it and eat it? Then, yes.
I wipe the lids of my cans before opening them, too. They sit on shelves here there and everywhere, and I don’t know what’s in that dust on the lid.
Step on it and grind it with your heel to make it obvious that it is no longer edible. Then get a clerk and offer to pay for it which as mentioned above probably won’t happen.
On a side note some of those bins are just downright difficult to self-serve from, with wonky tongs and that lid that won’t stay open and buns all stacked askew. It’s a wonder there aren’t bagels and rolls and croissants strewn all about the place.
We’re wiping the outer lids of canned food but eating food that fell on a public floor now?
would you throw away an apple that fell to the floor? A Croissant? a potato? a hard roll?
Yes you are supposed to pay for it, and to eat to too: people are too squeamish about dirt and germs which will almost surely do them no harm and which may do good by stimulating their immune systems.
However, for the merchant to adopt such an attitude toward the customers would be a PR disaster, so the merchandise is commercially unusable due to your negligence, so you should pay for it.
The floor in my house? I’d probably eat all of those after brushing it off.
The floor of a supermarket? Absolutely not.
Germs do people harm all of the time, from minor harm to death. I don’t know what the probability of germs causing harm from eating food off of the supermarket floor is (or the probability of it stimulating the immune system), but there are some pretty bad things that can be picked up on that food.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/11/19/3893178.htm