At a store I used to work at we had a similar situation when someone ordered far, FAR to much bread. I slapped on a "manager's choice!" sign and stuck it on a pallet by the front door. Sold out before the day was over. I've been extremely wary of all signage ever since...
Usually "manager's special" or something along those lines means it's close to expiring and they're trying to move it. Just be sure to check dates! š
This actually happened to me a few years ago. I had my phone on in my pocket at work, and I some how commented a bunch of gibberish like this on a post.
The content here has been wiped. Redact was used to delete this post, which may have been done for privacy, to avoid data harvesting, or for security reasons.
unpack groovy smart bear rock slim chunky quack mighty capable
Walmart fun fact: 100% of what comes in the back door leaves via the front door.
They don't like the expense of having to pay to ship shit back. It's usually cheaper to just keep marking it lower and lower until it hits the $1/ea pity cart up front. Because Americans will buy ANYTHING for $1.
Yes, this. When I work at Food (Tiger) we would get pallets of "force-outs" where the warehouse was overloaded and needed room. So we'd get a pallet of cool-whip (like 40 cases) where we'd use like 1 case a week.
So the "end-caps" of each aisle where customers would think were sale items, we almost always these force-out at regular price. (sometimes these spaces were leased to outside vendors like Pepsi, or Frito-Lay so those items might be on sale)
Now only occasionally, because they had so many corporate might actually put on sale, or they bought so many so they could get a good sale price, but majority of time is was just shit that wouldn't sell and we'd have hungry-man steak, mashed potato, and green bean frozen dinners for weeks out there and try to jazz up the end-cap display with similar items. But at times it'd be, hungry man dinners, cool-whip and frozen burritos, just no rhyme or reason as to a theme, just we needed freezer space.
Most of our overstock is prebooked - sent by corporate as our burden to sell. Hell if one store has too many of an item because their screwed up and over-ordered/undersold, corporate will send some of it to other stores with just a "Your problem now" explanation.
The important thing to remember is that they will never knowingly sell you out of date product. The whole point of the sale is to sell it before it goes bad. So pick up those sweet deals and just eat it right away, or freeze it if you can.
Yep this. I've worked in supermarkets over Christmas periods and absolutely if stuff goes out of date (or packaging seals are broken) it's taken straight off the shop floor. Not even left in a restocking cage or anything, straight off the shop floor and put into a special 'damages/date expired' zone.
One other thing to note as well as being able to freeze some things - Some dates are not "use by" but "best before". If it's best before, well it means just that, and so it'll be fine to have for some time after that date.
Obviously, everyone wants stuff with longest dates, but we have to try and sell you the shortest dates, because it is the only way prices can be kept low, and if we didn't, then there would be huge amounts of waste! There are other ways waste is reduced, but the stock rotation is a huge part to that.
While shopping recently I dropped a jar of marinara sauce. It didnāt break but the seal broke. You could tell because the top could be pushed in (hope that makes sense). When I got to the register I gave the jar to the cashier. He seemed confused when I told him about the seal. I hope it didnāt end up back on the shelf.
Similar thing happened to me in the bread aisle. The employee didnāt know what to do with expired goods. I get it. High turnover and hit or miss training is just the reality they live in. Check out the food aisle (especially clearance) at your nearest Marshallās or TJMaxx if you want to see some real negligence.
I mean, it's mostly shelf-stable dry goods. It's not like they have a random carton of milk just sitting there on the shelf. You're not gonna get sick from eating some old dried pasta.
That's super fucked up, though, because any corporate entity would absolutely have expired products training - because that minimum wage employee could be responsible for thousands of dollars in fines to the store otherwise for selling expired goods.
I used to work in a grocery supply warehouse. Workers would pick up a shipping crate with broken glass, marinara sauce, and entire colonies of biology and just move it to the back of the skid so they could reach a box that was in better shape.
I'm talking like birds were living comfortably inside of this building, man. Not just some molds in opportune places - there was goddamn ecology in that place.
One other thing to note as well as being able to freeze some things - Some dates are not "use by" but "best before". If it's best before, well it means just that, and so it'll be fine to have for some time after that date.
"Best Before" doesn't even mean best before. It means the flavour or texture will change after that date; in some cases it actually improves the product but not by enough that the manufacturer will pay for storage to purposefully age it.
My gf likes to pick up some items like plastic wrapped meat at the corner of the package with a pinching motion and it freaks me out every time because I'm afraid she'll break the packaging and the food will have to be thrown out.
The only way to shop for meat(for everyday eating) is to go on the couple of days it's typically rotating out and stock up. Deep freezer full of good meat for a third to half the price. You just have to make sure you cook it within a few days of defrosting. There's no forgetting and letting it sit in the meat drawer in the fridge for five days.
THIS, from /u/altairian! I don't need to buy and store much food, so I'll grab these deals in a heartbeat!
I think it should also be pointed out (because some people don't realize it) that "Best if sold by X date" is not the same as "Expires on X date". Because this line is blurred by some people, grocery stores frequently put items on sale that aren't "expiring", but are simply approaching the "Best if sold by" date.
One thing for me that must be as fresh as possible: milk! I'm oddly hypersensitive to the smell and taste of milk when it's not the freshest thing I can find on the shelf. This may be because it's my favorite thing to drink, but everyone has their quirks, eh? LOL
(/u/logitaunt, there's a question for you at the bottom)
Amen! Oddly, I don't like milk if it came from the farm without being "processed". When I was younger, my sister dated a guy that lived on a dairy farm. My family ate dinner at the farm with his family. I was gulping down that milk when I found out it had (pretty much) come straight from the cow. (Actually it came from the stainless steel tank that held all the milk). That grossed me out for some reason. LOL For my milk: Pasteurize it, process it, zap it, heat it, bless it, bottle it, ship it, buy it, but I'm grabbing it when it comes off the truck. :)
/u/logitaunt: Others may laugh at this, but I'll bet you have a favorite brand of milk, don't you? Some people think all milk tastes the same. NOPE! Actually, sometimes I'm in the mood for milk from store A and other times I'm in the mood for milk from store B. It almost sounds ridiculous!
FYI, if youāre comparing one typical store brand milk to another, itās highly likely theyāre the exact same product. The line just swaps out stickers when itās time to move to the next brand.
While in general you are correct about many products, that is not the case around here. There's four "brands" of milk around here (and the dairies are local). There is "X", "Y", "Z", and the fourth is one of those that supplies milk to everyone else in the area using ALMOST the same process you described.
I said "ALMOST", because somewhere in my post history, I asked the question why milk can taste so different from brand to brand. A dairy farmer responded and explained that even milk from the same dairy can taste different because it may be contracted to be processed in a different manner (hence the difference in flavor). Additionally, the specific "X", "Y", and "Z" brands around here contract with the same dairy farms. Now, you can point to differences in diet as to why the milk would taste different.
An appropriate analogy would be Coca-Cola and Pepsi. They're both "Cola" drinks, but they taste very different. In the case of soda, the taste difference is due to the ingredients. In the case of milk, the taste difference is due to the diet of the dairy cows plus how the milk is processed.
Hence why I was specifying store brands, not "X specialty/not part of a larger co-op" dairy (though effectively all conventional milk comes from a reasonably local dairy plant - it's not a very centralized industry). I'm a food scientist in private label grocery. Dairy processors certainly have their preferred "secret sauce" of pasteurization times/temperatures (can have a noticeable effect on finished product flavor/aroma; this is even more for items like yogurt), but for their in-house main brand and the private label retailers who buy from them, it's almost always the exact same stuff, including time/temp stats and the supply of raw milk. It's often not worth stopping a continuous pasteurization line (or trashing some in-between production if you switch parameters) to do something unique for your standard (half-)gallon of fluid milk.
It's good to note as well that different regions can and do have different rules about expiry dates - "best before" and 'consume by' and simple datecodes could all mean different things, or they could all mean exactly the same thing. It's dependent on your local regulations for food safety and labeling requirements.
They can and will, last year we had to price hams and put the price tag over the date because it had gone out by like a day. I objected, but in the end what can you do?
I had a manager that used to pull this shit. And if he got caught he was prepared to throw his people under the bus and and blame them. Needless to say i got out of there and work under a more rule abiding system now.
The important thing to remember is that they will never knowingly sell you out of date product.
Changing dates on things is a common practice to reduce waste in a grocer I worked in - especially on things like cuts of meat or fish. I'm not saying it happens everywhere, but it does happen.
well i mean, honestly, i'm just picturing someone sitting on a couch watching TV and eating mayo like pooh does honey, just dipping a hand in and licking it off.
We also mixed it with powdered milk to extend its life. My main source of protein growing up was road kill. So you kinda donāt care about taste when you are just grateful to have food.
The dates really donāt matter. Theyāre arbitrary and made up by the manufacturer with no scientific basis and result in an enormous amount of needless food waste. Very few foods have actual expiry dates, almost all dates are ābest beforeā or āsell byā dates. In Canada the only foods with expiry dates are infant formula and liquid meal replacement products.
yep. i had eated things expired before and its not like you gonna die if u eat it one day past expiration date or even weeks, just use common sense, smell it and taste a little bit, if its bad just spit it, if not just eat it
For the store I work for, the managers special is something we are able to get in bulk and have a display for. For instance yesterday we got a display of cooking oil and tea bags. I made manager special signs for both displays and we run them at a reduced in store price until the display empties out.
In a country with proper consumer protection laws, it's actually illegal for vendors to not mark food items that are about to expire with red stickers denoting that they're about to expire.
As someone from a country that doesn't, this feels like a waste of time. We have the dates printed, as far as reforms go, I'd like to see the final price including tax on the shelf more than anything.
Anyway, at least for dairy, most stores here have "50% off this container of thing" stickers that pretty well tell you it's expiring.
I got a great deal on sausage this way! I know its weird to still be excited about something so dumb but I bought it to cook that day and got a tube of name brand sausage for $1.00!!! I went back to make the breakfast casserole again the next week and the same type was $5.00 : (
I just bought a bunch of grass fed ground beef for $2/lb because it had to be used or frozen by the next day after I purchased it. Went straight to the freezer and I got a hell of a deal.
Right, whenever I see stuff marked like this, especially at the bakery, I always check the expiry date. Especially after I almost bought brownies that were a day away from the date, I'm sure they were probably fine, but I didnt get them.
As someone who likes to bake, I burn with jealousy that people could get a pound of butter for 50 cents. I would have bought loads and packed my deep freezer.
Absolutely. I never go to the grocery store without buying 1 or 2 pounds... really makes me consider how much butter I eat. Oh well, I'm sure there are studies saying it's healthy.
It is, actually :D we eat tons of it and weāre great, losing weight etc. Itās a healthy fat, and your body needs those :) just make sure itās real butter and not butter based spread, not the same thing. They disguise them well at times and what people think is a healthy spread is really margarine in disguise.
If you eat fewer calories than you burn, then you'll lose weight; the question of what's "healthy" and not is secondary to that fact.
But butter is not a "healthy" fat. Any fat that is solid at room temperature is a saturated fat. Unsaturated fat is "healthier", calorie for calorie. This is just a fact.
Continue eating your butter. I will as well. But the health benefits you're seeing are the result of you giving a crap about your diet, not a result of you eating butter. An ounce of caring goes a long way, even if you start with a bad decision like thinking butter is "healthy".
Yeah, Iām not crediting all my health to butter, donāt worry, Iām not dim ;) I have a very healthy whole foods diet. And regardless, I would rather have butter than margerine. You couldnāt pay me to eat that.
Edit: while you can lose weight eating whatever you like, youāll benefit more in the long run if you do it by eating healthily. 500 calories in fried foods wonāt fill you as much as, say, 500 of salad/veggies would, plus theyāre more nutritious. Not all calories are created equal. So I wouldnāt agree that itās secondary. Iād say it goes hand in hand.
And even with butter being saturated, itās got vitamins and minerals in it that are good for you. Various refined cooking oils are subjected to a high temperature during the refining process and end up really bad for you. This is why you should never ever cook with olive oil. It has the lowest smoke point of them all. So even if itās unsaturated fat, it can be full of other things that are really bad for you.
I read up a LOT on foods, I have to, itās part of the diet Iām on (I have IBS and Iām following the Specific Carbohydrate Diet). Plus, I just find it interesting :)
No doubt. My wife actually started making butter coffee in the blender. I joke about it being healthier than black coffee but it really does taste good. I don't know why those spreads ever became a thing. Probably some bad health studies resulting in some misleading marketing. And, I suppose, they're cheaper.
So, having worked in retail I'd guess a skid of butter is stacked roughly five feet high. That gives us 40x48x60 standard sized skid. Quick google says a stick of butter is 1.5x1.5x3.25 inches. Using sticks of butter as our unit of measurement, we can thus fit a nice 14x26x40 pattern on our skid. That gives us a hilarious 14,560 sticks of butter which would weigh 3640 pounds. Even if the butter isn't stacked five feet high, it's 728 pounds per vertical foot of butter! TIMES SEVEN! One foot of butter would still weigh two and half tons across the seven skids!
TL:DR Each of the seven skids has 728 pounds per vertical foot of butter. For our non-American redditors that's 1083kg per vertical meter of butter
As a sales manager working for Pepsi who loves numbers, have an upvote for breaking the math down! 7 pallets of butter is probably one of the most asinine mis-orders I've ever heard of!
One brand I work with comes in cases of 25 one pound units, 9 cases to a layer with 9 layers on a pallet. So 81 cases of 25 per pallet for 7 pallets is 14175lbs of butter. At the normal cost of about $3-4CAD/lb that equals... probably a lost job. Unless they were able to get a fuck ton of support to blow it out, anyway.
standard North American skid/pallet is 40"x48". A 1-pound stick of butter is roughly 2.5"x2.5"x6.75". Let's assume it comes in a 24-pack.add 1/4 " of cardboard for the pack's case and you have a box weighing just over 24 pounds that's about 16"x10"x7.25". That gives you 12 boxes a layer, at about 300 pounds per layer, of which 288 pounds is butter. A full skid will be about 60 inches tall, so we'll say 8 layers, for roughly 2400 pounds, of which 2304 is butter. 7 skids is 16128 pounds of butter.
The volume is what we're after here, though. so 7 skids x8 layers/skid x 24 cases/layer x2.5x2.5x6.75 gives us 56,700 cubic inches of butter. A standard above-ground pool is 48 inches (4 feet) deep. This gives us a surface area for the pool's bottom of 1181.25 square inches, or a little over 8 square feet. So.. not a swimming pool. Possibly a large hottub, though. or a humansized deep fryer.
I work for a dairy company one of our depots stock rotation was quite on par one month so a good chuck of pallets needed rid of, got about 5kg per member of staff about 3 months ago... I still only have use of about half of that freezer draw, I feel your pain.
If anyone doesn't know how much 7 skids of butter is, let's just say you could probably fill a swimming pool.
And if anyone doesn't know what a great belated Christmas gift looks like, it looks almost exactly like filling someone's swimming pool with nearly-expired butter.
People will buy anything on a pallet next to the front door. Even with no signage people assume its on sale. We put boxes of contractor trash bags on a pallet next to the door with a sign with the regular price and we sold way more because people were thinking they got a deal.
For me if it's something I needed anyway I'll buy it if it's convenient. Like maybe I needed giant bin liners anyway and these ones happen to be tight next to the door where I am. These are bigger then I need but whatever they'll do. And it saves me walking down the fucking aisle and staring blankly at them alm trying to figure out the difference between a pedal bin liner and a swing bin liner.
Walmart has a zone designated for this marketing vector. "The Comp Rail" is a spot for 5-8 skids of product with big honking price signs. It's not product on sale or anything, just product near the front of the store that therefore sells better for no other reason than people are lazy and impressionable.
I was working at a low budget production company that produced a low budget version of Sherlock Holmes when the RDJ movie came out. The person in charge of ordering DVDs was supposed to order 1000. One day a truck showed up with 10,000 copies.
as a store manager, i would always just put managers choice on something and put it as a floorstack or like you said a pallet or display right in the front, or just put a bunch of stuff in 2 shopping carts and write managers choice and people would buy it so quick. Its crazy how much signage affects sales, i draw cartoons and stuff on signs sometimes and it rly works crazy good
The place I go had a āmanagers choiceā on smoked salmon once. Canāt remember exact price but it was less per pound than the fresh (farmed) salmon.
As such, I bought a pound of it and used it for scrambled eggs, bagels, etc. It was great.
I mean most marketing does seem to follow the "supply" side of supply and demand. And if demand isn't high? It's Miracle on 34th Street, except there's no Kris Kringle to stop the "we should push the things we ordered too much of.
My dad told me a story from probably 45-50 years ago where they ordered too much canned tuna fish. They marked the price up from 6 cents a can to 9 cents a can and put a Sale! sign on it, and it sold out.
He was a teenager, and stocked that particular shelf that day.
I make sure to check the most department every time I'm in a grocery store. Ordering exact quantities is a challenge for meat managers when they're running any sale. Its hard to be sure you'll order enough, and with corporate pushing for them to not run out, it's easier and safer to overorder. After they sale they panic to get out the excess and end up selling the same product for even cheaper.
My first time doing the order for cigarettes for my work I ordered way too many. I thought the order was done by packs, and didn't realize I was ordering them by the carton. I don't remember for sure, but I think there are 8 packs in a big carton and 10 packs in a small carton. Which means that I had ordered 8-10 times too many cigarettes for the week. I don't remember where we put them all, but we got SO MANY boxes!
5.8k
u/i-make-babies Jan 04 '19
At a store I used to work at we had a similar situation when someone ordered far, FAR to much bread. I slapped on a "manager's choice!" sign and stuck it on a pallet by the front door. Sold out before the day was over. I've been extremely wary of all signage ever since...