I went to Ralph’s grocery store, purchased a carton of 12 Large Grade AA eggs, went through the check out, paid my bill, and upon obtaining my receipt, the checker points out to me that printed on the receipt is a recall for the exact carton of eggs I just purchased, saying they may be contaminated with salmonella.
My receipt says I may return them for a full refund…
But why were they for sale in the first place?
It was probably a fail-safe. The eggs were pulled and in the computer they put a notation that if any were sold the UPC code would spit that message out on the receipt so the cashier could notify you
It takes time and money to remove things from the shelves, and it’s easy to miss one. When you have a system that will warn you if you try to buy the item, it’s probably easier just to let the customer do the extra work for you.
(I’m not saying they didn’t try, just that they have no incentive to be extremely thorough when safeguards like this exist.)
Or is your question why didn’t the system throw up the flag when the eggs were scanned, and before you had to pay? That’s probably because the systems didn’t anticipate what I described above–a recalled product not being removed from the shelves due to oversight.
A customer might have had the eggs in his/her cart when the employee was pulling the cartons, or the carton might have been put in with the cartons of another brand. Or an employee might have been called away when pulling the bad eggs.
Hmm. At the chain I work for, there are a few levels of recall, and I imagine most big chains with good POS systems have similar levels. The most drastic level of recall (or pull-and-hold if we’re waiting for direction from a manufacturer or government agency) will involve removing all product from the shelves as well as a total block on sales. Most recalls/pulls-and-holds on consumables, however, involve specific lot numbers, while other lots are still sellable. In this situation, the register and receipt will notify the cashier and customer that a recall exists on the item, but will still allow the sale.
So, my WAG is that only certain lots of the eggs were on recall, and Ralph’s chose to alert the customer in case they wished to not take the risk, or at least wanted to double check the lot to make sure it was one of the non-recalled ones.
As an aside, this is one of the tangential reasons retailers are pushing for RFID to replace UPC on product; a single UPC covers multiple lots, and limited recalls which affect only some of a given product easily cause confusion, since a register can’t identify what’s good or bad, and it’s easy for employees to overlook bad product when processing a recall. With RFID, a register block can be put in for specific lots of a product, and recalled items can be more easily found and rounded up by employees.
A bit of a side-track-
When I was in high school many moons ago, I worked for a fairly major (but now defunct) supermarket chain in California.
One of my jobs every week was to go through the egg case and pull the expired cartons. I put the eggs in new cartons that the manager had somehow got that lacked expiration dates and put them back on the shelf for resale. The expired cartons were then returned to the distributer for credit.
The great thing was the blank cartons could stay on the shelf for many weeks!
When I complained to my boss that he was going to kill someone, he said “eggs stay good for a long time - those dates are just guidelines”.
I eventually quit.
I never buy eggs unless the expiration date is printed on the shell (Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods do this).
This is true. As a kid on the farm during WWII we would save surplus eggs for months. We would then trade them in at the local grocer for other items. The government would then buy them from the locals and use them for food in the military. GIs coming back would rant for years about having to eat old eggs.
This may be true, but I don’t think it is legal.
Also, the manager was stealing. He returned the empty cartons for credit, but sold the eggs anyway.
He was a dishonest asshole in most respects. One on the reasons I quit. Funny, it wasn’t a little mom and pop store - it was a major chain supermarket.