I notified the Kroger staff of this, remember? They said they'd get on it. Oh, they got on it alright. Fast-forward by a couple of weeks:
It's been a long time since I came to believe (since high school, I want to say?) that food items which go on sale are probably stale, rotten, or otherwise defective; but this is the first time I have chronicled first-hand the process by which corrupt grocery store management clears inventory.
3 comments:
I would have thrown all of the bad stuff into the OOD basket. That's what we all did.
Although to be truthful, using sales and markdowns to clear out old or out of date merchandise is a normal practice at Kroger.
We will also sell out of date products if it is known that they are technically still good, i.e. canned foods.
Certainly on-sale items are usually nearer their expiration date than regular-price items. But I've never bought anything on sale and regretted it. This is certainly an exceptional example.
I may meet you halfway and say that this Kroger is an exceptional(ly corrupt) grocery and that it has recolored my memories of sale pricing and similar demarcations. 'Cause:
- there was this one time they had Eckrich Farms sodium-free nitrate-free bacon on sale (and I was like, "YEAH! :D" because these are the two main reasons I avoid bacon, fat being a high-on-the-list 3rd). The sale was called a "Manager's Special" and it was $6 bacon on sale for $1.99. Turns out they expired that day, emphasis even if refrigerated (as is the similar case for milk and cheese expiration dates).
- just last week, they had a bunch of vidalia onions on sale. I only get vidalias because (for whatever reason) all of Kroger's other white and yellow onions are of the sweet varieties, and vidalias come closest to non-sweet (ironic, I know). Well, anyway, fruit flies EVERYWHERE (and by that I mean you could see them like a swarm of gnats with your naked eye from over a meter away from the tiny basket).
- Kroger has a nasty policy of not restocking Kroger lean ground beef until a) all the other ground beefs are sold or b) all the other ground beefs go past their expiration dates. And I do mean A or B, because this Kroger's meat aisle will always start out full, and like 2 days later there's an awkward 100% empty pocket on the farthest left-hand side (where they normally have lean beef), and it takes a week or two for the rest to go. By the last day of each cycle, you'll see oddly-placed packs of ground beef, usually of the 75%/25% variety (blegh) dispersed across the shelf. And most of them are already over half-brown, too. It's terrible.
And yet I still go. Why?
1. This Kroger and one particular Marsh are my two closest groceries; the others all would take a round-trip time of 20 minutes on the road. :\ (Which I know doesn't sound bad -- 10 minutes each way -- but think about it.)
2. Un-be-LIEV-a-bly, the Marsh near me is worse. It's the only "bad Marsh" I've ever seen in my life, and to go along with that it's the only Marsh I can think of in my memory that I would rank below even the best of Krogers. Really, really sad.
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