I bought it some time early last week, but due to complications it never got cooked. It is a sealed plastic package. It was on sale for .99/lb., so I won’t be heartbroked the throw it out, but I’d like to eat it if it’s safe.
If it’s bad, will it definitely smell?
A week? Ugh. I’d throw it out.
That’s too long even for me, and I tend to be lax about these sorts of things. I’d do 3 days, 4 days tops, and that’s pushing it.
Ok, decision made then. I figured it was too long, but wanted to check before I pitched it.
I bet it smells.
i’ve heard 4 days with chicken
It doesn’t have to be a total waste. Use it to catch catfish or go crabbing instead.
Reminds me of my great-grandfather’s catfish bait recipe…put chicken guts in a glass jar, set jar in the sun for a week. Done.
It’s chicken. Something else, I might take a chance with, but I never take a chance with chicken.
I wish I had* some *way to share the mental image I just had, of a bare chicken disco-ing on the bottom shelf of my fridge to Abba’s ‘Take a Chance.’
That was plenty! Now my coworkers are wondering what I am sniggering at. 
Delightful user name / title combo.
I rely on my nose more than I do the date on the package, especially for a food I’m going to cook thoroughly anyway, and haven’t had food poisoning yet.
I think all the OP had to do was take the chicken out of its wrapping to find out the answer.
So now that we’ve settled the matter of raw chicken, what’s the average lifespan of cooked chicken?
I made some grilled legs and thighs last Saturday, but then went out of town Sunday night and will be back Friday night…there is one leg and one thigh left, and I assume they will have gone bad.
Cooked chicken in refrig probably won’t have gone bad, but will almost certainly be dried out and unappealing.
If it was just in one of those plastic wrapped packages, I might have smelled it…but it in a very nicely sealed plastic skin. If I had opened it and it was bad, I would have had an open package of bad chicken to deal with for a week. As it is, it is sitting very quietly on the bottom shelf of the fridge, still wrapped, waiting for trash day on Tuesday to go become immortal in a landfill.
I wouldn’t know how to begin answering this question, since when I grill legs/thighs they don’t last long enough to worry 
I grilled legs last night too. YUM.
Now I’m singing Abba – deedle dee dee dee, chicken chance on me…
Ditto. I would unwrap and give it the whiff test. If it passed, stew it for several hours, then shred it. Very unlikely to make anyone sick.
