The store already factored that in when they chose to stop individually picking out items for the customer.
The customer is paying with their time and energy, and gets the opportunity to pick. The cost to the business is a little more wastage but it’s better than paying all the employees they would need. It was a compromise that created the modern supermarket. Just because some social compacts are old doesn’t mean that the compromise is outdated. If the store wants control they need to provide the manpower. Any relationship I have with my fellow shopper is a middleman problem. Any wastage is a middleman problem. Competition for shoppers is a middleman problem. The market has worked, this is the least wasteful option.
And with the huge increase in curbside pickup during the pandemic, I suspect they’ve moved back to the old way of doing things. If the store employee is picking out my items, that gives the store a lot more control over stock rotation.
So I’m trading control over that for the convenience of not having to drag myself through the store during a pandemic.
If they don’t restock with new milk, the shelf will eventually be empty. If they restock before that point, what’s already on the shelf will be older than the new stuff they put out and therefore not get bought.
If the items in front are dated fresh enough for my expected holding time, I won’t rummage for something fresher.
My ethos is “take what you need”. If nobody buys stuff that’s less fresh, or just fresh enough, then it may expire and go to waste. That’s bad for prices, bad for consumers, bad for business, bad for the climate, just bad all around. And basically no noticeable upside for me. So I don’t do it.
That works for bakery goods already, but seems like a pain in the ass for dairy. You’d need an extra refrigerated section, and it would have to be divided up properly to handle pint to gallon size items. For bakery stuff they can just pile it on a table, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a round cake or a long box of donuts.
In any case, as mentioned before, there doesn’t seem to be an actual need for this. Enough people just pick from the front to keep things cycling. But the people picking from the back are still driving up the spread of dates. There wouldn’t be nearly the variation if people always picked from the front.
Lots of food including highly natural food like say lemons and tomatoes are acidic.
Mrs P loves to point out how long it takes white bread to go stale now and takes this as evidence it’s not “food”, and now you are pointing out a drink has turned into something undrinkable after a few months and take this as evidence there was something wrong with it - these multinational food conglomerates just can’t win!
At a practical level I already said the current system seems to work out fine in practice, but that I saw habitually taking the freshest - without need - as mildly jerkish.
The economics of what you say are interesting though. What is happening is that the store is working on a supply chain that - most economically and with minimal waste - delivers food in X days. But the people you describe are taking advantage of the store’s “open” stocking system to be able to get food in X minus a day or two. They are paying for a slower supply chain than they are obtaining, by riding on those who don’t need such a fast supply chain.
In fairness, it might have become more drinkable. It was undrinkable to start with. Perhaps it had degraded into pure water with brown coloring, which might have actually tasted fine. I didn’t test it.
Ordinary cola is also acidic and I’ve never seen a similar issue there, even with cans sitting around for years. But most likely, the problem was a random defect in the plastic lining, which could have applied to any drink.
I don’t see that the OP said anything at all one way or the other about always picking the farthest-out date. It appears to be describing a single example, without anything about motive or frequency.
It’s a sell-by date. The store’s not going to pull it until late that day or early the day after.
The OP doesn’t mention any extenuating circumstances, just that the consumer wants the freshest stuff possible and thus pulls from the back. In any case, the discussion evolved in that direction since no one here disputes that it’s ok to grab one with a date past when you expect to finish it by, even if it’s not in the front.
Maybe I misunderstand, but supermarkets were big in the 1960’s and open dating was not. (They used to have “closed” date codes that were hard for consumers to understand.)
Like most here, I do watch the dates. I feel a little bad about it because poor people, juggling three part time jobs, don’t have time for it and will get what I pass over.
I always pick the freshest product no matter what it is and don’t feel the least bit guilty doing it either. That’s why I always do our grocery shopping personally and don’t use any “service” as I don’t think they’d do that. I’d get what I get if I did.
Most drug “use by” dates are shorter than “real” because the company needs to test out to that date (costs money) and would just as soon you buy new stuff and not use your leftovers. But some really do expire shortly after that date. Some, like aspirin, smell different when they break down. I confess to keeping old drugs around, and only throwing them out of they smell or taste wrong, or if they’ve gotten a lot less effective.
That’s totally dependent on what they feel is a reasonable length of time for things to stay on the shelves. I mean, one store may find out that their customers don’t buy milk within say… 3 days of the expiration date, while another may find that theirs happily buy it. Meanwhile, they may consistently get shipments from their suppliers that are 10 days out.
It would make more sense for the first store to manage their inventory more closely so that they rarely have milk that’s less than 4 days out, while the second one could be a little less concerned.
That’s basically where I’m going- if enough people buy from the back, the store will notice eventually and manage their stock accordingly, so as to not end up with a bunch of soon-expiring milk. Or maybe they’re poorly managed, or don’t care about that waste, or something along those lines. But that seems like the low hanging fruit and/or core competency of grocery stores to me, so I’d imagine they’d be on top of that.
If I specifically require the product to last for longer (for example if I am buying some fresh ingredient now for a meal I plan to cook next week), then maybe, otherwise, no - if it’s in date, and I will use it within date, I will buy the one at the front, because to do otherwise is to encourage the increase of food waste.
I don’t know about other products, but at least some cheese gets recycled.
When I was a truck driver, I delivered 20 tonnes of cheese to a farm in the country. The cheese was all in little retail packs and there were several different types and brands. They were all past their ‘sell-by’ date.
I asked what they did with it, imagining animal food etc, and was taken into a shed where some people were busy removing the wrapping and throwing the cheese onto a conveyor. They told me that it got all minced up together and then roasted. The result was finely powdered cheese.
“Who buys that,” I ask,
“W******,” my guide says. “It’s the cheese flavour on their cheese and onion crisps.”
Yeah, I think picking loose produce, it’s inevitable that you’re going to select the items that look like what you want (although with some things like red peppers, I will pick one that is dark and just ever so slightly starting to wrinkle, because the flavour will be better for cooking).
But packs of meat, bottles of milk, etc that are notionally all the same, if everyone takes them from the back, the ones at the front will be wasted.