Anybody else experiencing this?
What causes it?
I don’t remember this beyond the last decade.
You and I are obviously walking into different supermarkets.
I can’t recall any grocery store smelling like a dumpster.
I’ve seen a few that were a little dirty but they didn’t smell.
Sometimes I detect a sort of background sour milk smell. Not strong, but just enough to catch my nose. This across all sorts of stores in many states.
I see the OP frequents Safeway.
I’ve noticed a smell of overripe leafy vegetables in Chinese grocery stores sometimes, but not in supermarkets in general.
Theres a particular grocery store, a big nat’l chain. Smells like rotting fish, shrimp and crab as you as you walk in the door. It knocks me down everytime I go there. Hate that place.
I used to go to a Winn Dixie down in Atlanta that always smelled like vomit. It seemed like a pretty clean store, so it was always a mystery.
No supermarket is going to want to smell like a dumpster—it’d be awful for business.
I can imagine things that might make a store smell bad, but they’d be either a one-time thing, or evidence of a poorly-run store.
If this is something you’re smelling in all supermarkets, especially if you didn’t used to, maybe it’s you—maybe a symptom of some physiological issue you’re having.
I’ve noticed it in smaller urban stores, especially when I lived in Brooklyn. I’ve noticed it in DC as well, but not as often.
Most grocery stores have the produce right up front. If stray pieces and parts of fruits and vegetables fall behind and underneath displays and are never cleaned up I could imagine their eventual decay smelling pretty bad.
I work in a produce store. Stray pieces of produce often fall behind displays or in otherwise unreachable (and unnoticed) places. More often than not, they dry rot or dry out. When we find them months or years later, they about half the size and hard as rocks. They don’t appear as if they would have smelled bad during their transformation. Except for one thing, potatoes. Potatoes smell awful when they start going bad. I wouldn’t expect the random person to know that smell, but if I walk into a store that has potatoes going bad, I can recognize if pretty quickly. But even if when that happens, eventually those potatoes are gone and new ones are in so it would be a one time thing for the OP.
I’m curious to know if it’s one store or all the stores and if it’s sometimes there or always there. One store, once in a while, could be something like a nearby drain with stagnant water or dirty mop water that gets forgotten about when an employee puts the mop bucket in a closet that doesn’t get used often. It could be a display of (good) product that the OP doesn’t like the smell of. It could be the wind carrying the scent wafting from the dumpster over to the front door (and dumpsters used for produce tend to smell really, really bad, especially in summer). It could be a dead animal purifying. It could be a lot of things, but we’d have to know when/where/how often the OP notices this.
I frequent Safeway and have never smelled anything bad.
There was a small grocery in the soon to be dead shopping center near me. Evrey can in it had expired at least a year before. Even that place didn’t smell bad.
The smell is coming from the mold on the coils of the refrigeration equipment. The trays that hold the produce are cleaned on a regular basis, but not the cooling coils under those trays. If you were able to open up an ice machine for example, you would not buy ice from a mini-mart again.
When you smell this in a grocery store, don’t buy produce there. Or anything that is not is a can or other package.
I once followed a homeless gentleman into a grocery store who’d obviously been urinating and defecating in his pants for a while. The stench was eye-watering. He was escorted out quickly but the smell, even after that brief encounter, lingered long enough for several patrons to complain.
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We have 2 huge walk-in coolers at the Stadium were I volunteer for concessions. If they are not cleaned regularly they start smelling to high heaven. I’ve cleaned them enough times that I know that smell immediately. It’s a gross, putrid mildew-y smell. You don’t want that smell if the health inspections are due.
Dumpster smell is different. IMO. Equally as bad. There’s a dead smell I associate with dumpster odor.
Jumping from ‘supermarkets smell like dumpsters’ to ‘there’s mold on the evap coils’ is some world-class speculation.
I just noticed this same thing last Friday. I walked into the grocery store and immediately noticed a bad odor. To me, it smelled like rotten meat or fish. As far as I can remember, it was the first time I ever noticed it. The store has always been very clean. It could have been a million different things. We’ve had a very hot summer, maybe it was food in a dumpster or garbage can that hadn’t been emptied or it was emptied but hadn’t been cleaned out. Nothing like the combo of hot, humid weather and food garbage!
I go to a lot of different grocery stores and I don’t recall smelling dumpster at any entrances. Some may have less agreeable odors elsewhere in the store (seafood & restrooms, especially) but not up front.
One store I go to used to have a very elderly cashier that suffered obvious incontinence problems. It could be detectable all throughout the store. I haven’t seen her in a while, though.
Yes me too, many smaller markets in NYC have that dumpster smell. Many times that smell comes from a dumpster or other garbage area which is often in a side room or a basement area. I’ve worked in many of these stores when I was a consultant. It just seems like it’s a lack of space issue as well as no outside storage for garbage. The ‘employee only’ areas are typically very dirty, like a oily dirty, which I’m sure has something to do with that too. They are quite disgusting.