“Finish your vegetables, there are starving children in China!”

Well, my mother never really said this to me, but it is a mother cliché the world over (except maybe in China. Because that could be weird. “Finish your vegetables, you’re starving!” I suppose, truth is, there are starving people everywhere. So, all mothers should be saying “… there are starving children all over!“).

Still, it has to be said, regardless of childhood admonishing, a lot of people are lazy and as a result, are wasteful.

As you may know, I work in organic food, in a small department that is part of a much bigger supermarket. If you are Canadian, you may know this market, because it is SUPER. One might say it is a SUPER store. As with most stores, we end up throwing quite a bit of product away. It expires, it gets damaged during shipping or storage, and all sorts of other things. Such is life. The cost to the company isn’t an entirely big deal, but they are aware of the waste.

In the old days, they were allowed to give expired products to organizations such as homeless shelters (which I remember from when I volunteered with a homeless shelter during my 3 years of high school– we used to receive bags filled with two-day-old bread and other things), but now they cannot, because of a fear of being sued if someone were to claim to become ill off such fare.

Now there isn’t much they can do in that respect, the same way it is sometimes difficult to prevent products from becoming damaged. And that’s fine, I understand that.

What I don’t understand is how some customers can be so incredibly lazy! Every day, I arrive at work at 7am, which is before the store opens. I walk down my two aisle department, and pick up abandoned products from the night before. This morning alone, I came across two frozen formerly frozen pizzas and a package of bacon. On the shelf. Who in their right mind would walk from the frozen section (two aisles over) with their frozen food, and decide that it would be okay to leave it on a dry shelf?

But, even that I can forgive when I compare them to some other customers. Like, the one who left a chocolate muesli yogurt on the price check scanner. The price check scanner is not refrigerated. However, the refrigerator right next to it (as in, it is PRICE CHECKER | REFRIGERATOR ) most certainly is. Maybe next time, you could reach over, extend your arm the extra 6 inches, and put it in the big thing projecting coldness, and happily displaying other yogurts just like the one you’re carrying. This kind of laziness bothers me. Add to that the fact that now a perfectly good product has been wasted because of laziness, well, you’re just lucky that I work the day shift, and that the idiots shop at night, because I could be inclined to do some serious damage. Grrrr.