“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.
So, you work at a SUPER store huh? Ah, I see.
It is ridiculous how stupid people are. Like, I seriously get bothered sometimes by going out in public because I am then surrounded by people that do not have good common sense (or any sense for that matter). It’s lazy, it’s rude, it’s wasteful, and it’s just plain embarrassing that some people haven’t got a clue about things. :P
Oh, I totally agree.
There’s a movement called “Freecycle”, or something along those lines. Basically, freecyclers dumpster dive at supermarkets at the end of the day to get all their food needs. I read an article by someone who went along with them on one of their raids, and he listed all the things they came up with in the dumpster - fresh bread, fresh milk, perfectly fresh vegies, packets of biscuits and other goods that had weeks to go before they expire…
The waste we see (not only by consumers, but by the companies themselves who just chuck things out) is just disgusting.
Ah. The joys of working in a supermarket where you see all kinds of people, smart and incredibly stupid alike.
I remember one shift I was asked to return a few items left behind by shoppers who got to the checkout and decided they didn’t want them. I went down the aisle with all the baking ingredients to put some icing sugar back on the shelf and I was greeted with what looked like someone’s attempt to bake a cake.
A bottle of leaky milk had been put on the shelf next to the flour. Paper bags of flour. The milk had leaked into about 10 bags of the flour forming a lovely gluggy waste.
So, 10 large bags of flour and two litres of milk were wasted. I don’t know who is more at fault in this case. The person who planted the milk, or the large amount of people who would have walked past it and should have told one of us about it so we could go and clean it up and possibly save some flour!
In my house it was “the starving kids in Africa”. Heh.
I know what you mean though. I worked at a supermarket for a while and it was awful to see things go to waste. I always knew it happened, but after a while of working there I could see all the stuff being discarded. Not much to be done since it was expired stuff. But clients make it worse most of the time. I worked closing shifts late at night, when the store was an utter disaster. I found meat in the toy’s section, fresh fruits with canned spaghetti, etc. Sometimes it hard to find these misplace things and they’d be found the next day, or the next, all decayed.
I specially hated it when people hid the fresh food behind/under other things and it took even longer for someone to find it was there. “OMG I don’t want to buy these apples anymore… where do I put them? let’s see… how about inside the tall box where there broom handles go. Yes, perfect.”
Haha Aisling, you make me want to rescind my application to Superstore RIGHT NOW. Goshhh isn’t really that much of a mess working in grocery stores? I always imagined that it would just be the arm fatigue, from scanning too much stuff.
I follow good etiquette when food-shopping, and only place things in different aisles when I’m hiding them from other people =P
I’ve never worked at a supermarket but things like that annoy me.
It’ll cost a bomb but maybe your store should integrate some technology, where an internal robot detects when items are being wrongly placed, and says, “Put that back where you got it!” or something like that. :P
I know what you mean. I used to work in a store and people are so wasteful. They can’t be bothered to put things back where they are supposed to be. Customers suck.
Everytime my Mom would use that phrase on me I’d tell her to ship the extra leftover food over since she cared so much. Usually, it didn’t end well.
I tell me kids not to waste because when I was their age I literally had no food. I only was made to go to school for the sole purpose of getting a meal. I learned things yeah, but had it not been for that I would have stayed home when I was sick. When we lived in Missouri my cousin & I would scrounge up icesicles to put in the freezer for when my family couldn’t afford the water bill. If I get something that I do not want however & I am WAY accross that super store I hold on to it & ask the cashier to please take it from me. It’s not because I am lazy, it is because I noticed that if you put it back it is ‘nasty’ but if an employee does it, it is ok. People around here are weird that way. It doesn’t bother me in the least though.
Eew yeah. I’ll be more aware of my own shopping habits. I don’t think I’m that bad, and I am pretty confident I wouldn’t leave a frozen or refrigerated product out to go bad, but I do have a mentality of “Oh, someone gets paid to put this away.” I’ve worked retail plenty, and put plenty of customers’ moved items away. Luckily none of them were perishables.
It is so messed up that a homeless person could get a hand out and then end up making money by suing because a donation made them sick. I am in the U.S., so that is something that happens A LOT. People sue over any and everything and I think it’s disgusting. I dunno about there, but here all of our commercials even have a disclaimer on the screen. For instance, a Subway ad says “Do Not Attempt” when a woman eats a five dollar bill.
Goshh, I cannot stand it when people just leave something out at a random place. Does it really take that long to put it back on the shelf? =_=
‘Finish your dinner, there are starving kids in Ethiopia!’ is what I always got.
Ugh! CUSTOMERS! Don’t get me started. I have 4 years of horror stories, don’t get me started. I know SO many people who work (or have worked) at Superstore. I think that place employs half of the students at the high school I went to. People are just so lazy, and we don’t really realize how ridiculous people can actually be until we work in retail. It’s like, people are perfectly nice sensible adults until they walk through the doors of a store .. then, all of a sudden, they are all 5 year olds again.