Mild hijack: During my last trip to the store, I again saw someone buying - must have been twenty gallons of milk. These are often the same people who are also buying bread in bulk. I often wonder what the story might be behind this.
I thought it might be for some sort of group home, but their other purchases don’t reflect this. Just milk, and sometimes bread.
Stores can do a better or worse job at managing your stock, but no matter how good they are my point remains: if everyone picked from the back, some milk will remain and eventually expire. They depend on the presence of pick-from-the-front people to keep this from happening.
How closely do you think a store can predict demand? Within 10% seems very good but perhaps doable. If the store puts out 50 gallons and sells 45 today, then tomorrow there will be 5 gallons of day-old milk. If everyone only pulls from the back, that 5 gallons will never be sold because at the start of each day there will be 45 gallons of fresh milk in the rear. However, if everyone pulls from the front, then 40 people will get totally fresh milk and 5 get day-old. No waste whatsoever, and only a tiny decrease in average freshness (never more than a day old). The remaining 5 gallons of fresh milk will be day-old milk tomorrow.
Now consider a store which is not as well run and overestimates demand by 100%, keeping 50 gallons out when they only sell 25 a day. If everyone picks from the rear, that 25 gallons eventually goes bad–a big waste. But if everyone pulls from the front, then there is again no waste and people only get day-old milk; not a huge deal.
So while improved stocking policies help the matter, they don’t eliminate it. The only way to eliminate it is to predict demand exactly (not plausible), regularly deplete your stock completely (annoying for customers), or–as is the case in practice–have a contingent of customers that pull from the front.
Sure, give yourself a gold star. I’ve said from the beginning that people should look for expiration dates based on what they need. Reducing waste is a good thing. I might also suggest buying smaller quantities at a time, but if that means more driving to the store, that’s not necessarily a good option either.
You’re assuming that every such product gets delivered to every store daily, and always with a date one day in advance of the last delivery.
Judging by the dates I see on the shelves, this isn’t so. If, say, today is February 19, and I go to the store: I don’t see product dated, say, four days out and five days out and maybe six days out. I see product dated, maybe, four days out (or maybe only one day) and, if I look behind it, product dated not one day later but a week or, in the case of ultrapasteurized products, yogurt, and so on, possibly 2 weeks or even more later. There’s a significant jump in dates between batches.
And it isn’t just that completely depleted stock means the customers don’t get any. It’s that full shelves sell product. Under ordinary conditions, at least, the appearance of paucity doesn’t sell product – at the farmers’ market I call it last-pint syndrome, and all the other vendors know exactly what I mean. If I bring three cucumbers, I don’t sell any cucumbers. If I bring thirty cucumbers, I sell 27 of them. It’s counterintuitive, and it doesn’t always work that way; but, very often, if there’s only a little of something out, customers seem to feel there must be something wrong with it, and they don’t buy it.
I feel like the logic of the situation is being lost on some, so here’s a different example of the same thing, but totally self-interested so as to eliminate any moral/ethical aspects.
You like canned beans. You eat them regularly, and also like to keep a reasonable stock of them around, say 50 cans, in case of disaster. On average, you eat a can a day, though this varies. When you go to the store, you pick up enough cans to replenish your stock to about that 50 cans.
When you go to make a meal, you have a choice: pick the newest can or the oldest. If you pick the oldest can, you’re getting roughly 50-day-old beans, which probably isn’t a big deal since they’re canned. They’re 50 days old because you eat a can a day and that’s how long your buffer is.
If you pick the newest, you’ll probably get a can that you just bought, though if it’s been a while since you shopped, you might dig into your stock a bit. Regardless, you’re always getting something pretty new.
The problem is that the old cans never get cycled. They collect dust and eventually go bad. Unless you wait so long that you eat all 50 cans before making another trip to the store, that last can will never get eaten. Even if there does come a time when you need that can, you won’t eat it because it’s so old. It just gets tossed.
Therefore you have an interest in always eating the oldest can. It keeps your stock cycling, and as long as the total amount of stock is small compared to the timeframe it goes bad in, there is no downside.
And any time you want to eat beans in your own house, the cans of beans of whatever age are all there. You don’t have to change clothes, put your coat on, get in the car, drive half an hour or an hour round trip, put gas in the car, and so on, in order to get one.
If you lived in the grocery store, there’d be no downside to always taking the oldest can from there, either.
Only because I’m trying to keep the example simple. It works the same way for other delivery schedules. Say milk is delivered every 3 days, and a store keeps 100 gallons on the shelf but sells 30 a day. The store puts out their initial stock and after 3 days there are 10 gallons left of 3-day-old milk. The store replenishes this back to 100 gallons.
If people pull from the rear, then again that 10 gallons never gets sold. If people pull from the front, then the first 10 customers get 4-day-old milk. Not as nice as totally fresh milk, but considering that day-3 shoppers were already putting up with 3-day-old milk, not that big a change.
That just reinforces my point further. If people are unwilling to take one of the last few items, then it doesn’t matter how well the store predicts demand, because it will always be less than whatever they put out. So it’s even more crucial that they sell that slightly-old stock the next day.
I mean, I’ve probably said this a half-dozen times by now, but I’m not arguing against pulling from further back if it means reduced waste (either the food itself or the travel expenses). It’s about pulling from the back unconditionally, and to the maximum degree. If you’ll drink the milk tomorrow, pull from the front. If shopping is hard and you need your milk to last two weeks, pull from the back. Simple.
If the 4 day old milk is going to go bad before I can use it, it’s no good to me. And the milk that came in today may well be dated not 4 days later, but two weeks later – so I may be able to use two in that time span, and zero of the 4 day old stuff.
Well, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I’ll often deliberately buy packages with different dates, for that matter: if the stuff on the shelf is dated either one week or three weeks ahead, and I’ll use about one container a week and probably won’t be back for three weeks, I’ll buy one with the one-week date and two with the three-week date.
But while you say you’re agreeing with that, you also seem to be saying that the store shouldn’t have the fresher milk on the shelf for me to choose from, because they should be controlling their inventory to force people to only buy the newer stuff. Maybe I’ve misunderstood that. – maybe it’s @bump I’m arguing with about that, not you.
But you did also say
and part of what I’m saying is that this very often isn’t true. There’s often IME a big gap in dates between one batch and the next batch that goes on the shelf.
I’ve seen people buying ginormous quantities of certain products at Costco from time to time but not at a “normal” grocery store.
I’m definitely not saying that. I did say that that is a solution to the problem, and probably happens, in practice–I regularly see empty rows in the dairy section at the local Wal-Mart. Could be incompetent management, but it could also be them intentionally depleting stock to clear out the older stuff. Either way, annoying to the consumer.
That’s potentially bad inventory management. But it could also be that the old milk is from multiple batches ago, and is still there because there aren’t enough people pulling from the front to cycle things well.
Or, it could be their supplier, which is pulling their product from multiple sources, each of which has different delays in their pipeline, and so sometimes you get lucky and sometimes not. Still, the worst-case for pulling from the front is getting milk a day older than what everybody got the day before (because the fresh shipment hadn’t arrived yet). So it’s only a tiny bit worse for those people, but still has the advantage that you never end up with the really old stuff.
I was doing that when I was shopping for 4 weeks at a time before we got vaccinated. Now I’m back to buying for a week or two, and I actually manage my home inventory by buying a week of “fresh” (pasteurized) milk and another week of ultra-pasteurized milk. The front cartons of both of those routinely have enough time on them for me to expect to finish them while they are still good.
(And most stuff keeps well enough that I don’t bother to check the dates.)
Or it could be that the supplier of that item doesn’t deliver to that store every day. I’ve had stores tell me things along the lines of “That usually comes in on Tuesdays.”
Again – I’ve seen selections in which some of the items are dated, say, February 19; and the rest of the batch is dated, say, March 7. Not only a day’s difference.
If the March 7 batch didn’t show up until February 19, then yes, on February 18 nobody could buy anything dated more than a day ahead. That can, and does, happen. It screws up infrequent shoppers when it happens, as well as those who aren’t going to use the whole container at once. It’s not a tiny thing that doesn’t matter to whether I get to have that food or not.
Yes, I’ll do that too, sometimes.
Yeah, I’m not checking the dates on the canned or frozen goods, except occasionally at home to make sure I’m rotating the ones in my own cupboard/freezer. I’m not even usually checking in the store the dates on things like sealed half-pounds of cheese, because IME they’re nearly always dated months ahead.
And again, is that spread a result of people always picking from the back, or is it because there is actually that much variation? Because those two values are not the same, just as the difference in my beans example might be 50 days with pick-from-the-front and three decades in pick-from-the-back.
If we’re still talking ordinary milk and there really is that much variation simply from one batch to the next, then yes, the store or supplier or someone is incompetent. That’s almost the difference between fresh and already-expired milk.
Regardless, it doesn’t change my point. If your store is incompetent and has some milk that expires tomorrow and some that’s two weeks out, and you aren’t going to drink all of it in a day, then get the fresh stuff. And then find a different place to shop because they’re going to toss that milk tomorrow or use it in the soup of the day or something, and none of that is as efficient as managing their inventory better.
But at the same time, even if your store does a good job–shipments at least every few days, no giant variation in expiration dates, and so on–it is still in everyone’s interest if people only pull from further back when they have a need. And that need will be less when fewer people do so.
I’ve routinely seen those spreads on ultrapasteurized milk.
The non-ultrapasteurized is probably coming from different suppliers. In any case, it’s never dated three or four weeks out.
They don’t have to be incompetent. And they’re the only stores (yes, multiple stores) in my small-town area. They’re just small-town stores, which are not going to be getting daily deliveries on everything, no matter how competent they are.
Why do you think the stores are in control of their distributors? It’s closer to the other way around.
I think most fresh staples (milk, meat, fruit) are delivered 2-3 times a week where I shop. But I’ve seen a pretty wide spread on the dates of the ultra-pasteurized milk.
I mentioned “stores or their suppliers” multiple times already. At a certain point I assumed you’d read “stores” as including their supply chain.
Isn’t UHT milk supposed to last like months? I had some tetrapaks of the stuff and it was still good after like 6 months, though the consistency was getting a bit off.
I’m even less able to choose a different supply chain to shop at than I am to choose a different store. Short of picking the milk up directly from my neighbors, of course; and if I do that it isn’t going to be pasteurized at all, and will be good for an even shorter period of time.
I don’t think the ultra-pasteurized we get around here is the same thing as the UHT you’re talking about. The ultra-pasteurized we get is good for several weeks, but not for several months; and it needs to be kept refrigerated all along the line.
I buy ultra-pasteurized milk like that. The best buy date on the one I buy is about 4-6 weeks out, and yes, it’s refrigerated at the store and in my house.
You might be thinking of ultra high temperature milk