Everytime I buy a case of soda from a mom & pop convenience store I almost always find that its past its expiration date. Way past it! Now I don’t know if it makes too much difference for regular soda, but with diet it does! Aspartame loses its sweetness after a few months and you wind up with club soda.
So are these small stores deliberately buying old stuff cheap? It sure seems like it. I know there aren’t any laws about it (its not dairy products or anything) but its got to be against Coke & Pepsi’s policies. Who are they buying this stuff from?
Sometimes it’s only possible to order merchandise in large quantities. If you don’t do much volume, you may have to store most of your order for months before you can sell it. Do you always get stale soda from the same store? If so, maybe they just have poor inventory control.
Would the costs saved by storing and selling expired soda exceed the (already pretty low) costs of buying it fresh?
Also: try writing Coke and Pepsi directly. Even if they can’t do anything to help you (which they probably can), they will (a) be very contrite, which is always satisfying, and (b) quite possibly send you stuff.
Sometimes this can happen in a very large store, too.
My wife once bought a six-pack of Diet Hawaiian Punch from a store belonging to a huge chain in the Chicago area. We both noticed that it tasted very sour. She called the phone number on the can to tell them about it, and they said that they hadn’t produced that kind of pop in several months. Sure enough, the date on the bottom of the can was from one year prior. Somehow, a year-old six-pack of punch made its way onto the shelf of a large grocery store.
The company sent us a coupon for a free six-pack of pop.
The produce and grocery market on the ground floor of my apartment building sells stuff that’s so out of date, it’s funny.
A week ago, I was in a pinch for some dishwasher detergent, so I go there. Near the detergent, they had a bottle of Future acrylic floor finish that was about 14 years old. The stuff had aged from its original water-clearness to a pale amber. How did I know it was old? In the bottle was a coupon (printed on a slender strip of plastic that will pour out of the bottle so you’ll have it to buy the next bottle) with a 1989 expiration date.
In terms of food, they often have stuff that’s at least a couple months past the last sale date.
You may want to contact your local Board of Health, gotpasswords. An occasional out of date item might pass, but if things are as bad as you say – especially when it comes to food – the Board of Health will want to know.
That’s interesting. Do you live in an town that doesn’t have a local beverage company distributor? Or is there at least a distributor in a nearby town? In my town (greater metro area population about 50K) it is the distributors themselves who are responsible for rotating stock. Pepsi or Coke truck pulls up in front of the store, brings in new stock and takes away anything that’s gone past the “sell by” date.
In fact, our local Pepsi distributor gathers up all their expired stock and donates it to the homeless shelter where I work.
I have to chime in here, I had an expired soda once, 20 oz. it was HORRIBLE (Mountain Dew Code Red). Now, when ever I am at a conveince store that is not a chain, or the interior looks dirty, I check the dates, when I remember, I check the dates on the bottles in chain stores… but usually take for granted the rotation of stock.
On Got’s Hijack… I was in a store once that had Sonic The Hedgehog Pasta on the shelf. This was some 8 years after the game was made. The can was also dusty, which obviously should follow stock not touched in 8 years.
May of these mom and pop stores are probably not buying direct from a Coke/Pepsi distributor. It is against their policies to sell expired merchandise and IIRC it is part of an agreement with the retailer that they will not do so and that Pepsi/Coke will generally handle FIFO issues. If a retailer is buying sodas from a third party vendor there probably is not much they can do unless they find a contractually bound supplier doing something wrong.