Leaving things they decided they don’t want just wherever in a store. It’s annoying as a customer, because now I have to dig through their mess to get the product I actually wanted, and even moreso as an employee.
At least put it back in the right department. The underpaid employees who have been there since before the store opened really don’t want to have to play the game of “How long has this ground beef been sitting in a produce basket, and how much product did we just lose?”
I remember a story of a guy talking about how the store reeked and smelled terrible. After doing tons of searching at the epicenter of the smell, turns out some guy hid a 5 pound beef brisket on the bottom shelf, hidden behind a bunch of breakfast cereal.
You can and will find terrifying things working in grocery.
I once found a pack of beef jerky that had become 90% mold. It was tucked all the way towards the back of the shelves, partially shoved into the crack between two of them. We had no clue how long it had been sitting back there, because jerky rarely needed a full teardown.
Found a package of ground beef randomly hidden in the very back of the milk cooler. Thankfully kept fairly cool, and still in date, but a customer had stuck it there because he wanted to come back later. He came back the next day and tried to file a complaint because it wasn’t there.
Fish left in the bathroom. Like, straight up a pack of salmon fillets, just left there on the top of the toilet tank. Our best guess was that someone wanted to steal it, but either couldn’t fit it or got spooked and just abandoned it. It was in a far corner, barely used bathroom, too.
Half eaten fruit or candy thats been shoved to the back of a low shelf. You know a kid did it, there’s massive mess back there, and depending on what aisle they hid it in, it might have been there for a couple days to a week. Once found a bell pepper some kid had chomped into.
This is more just “general trash”, but still not uncommon if your store has a hotbar: Stolen food containers. People grab their dinner, eat it throughout the store, and then just put the trash wherever. If you’re lucky, they leave it somewhere obvious. If you’re unlucky, you find an open container of half-eaten rotisserie chicken shoved into a vent after they turned the heat on for the winter. Going past the deli in my store has triggered minor PTSD at times. That smell… Just… Hot rot. That’s the only way to describe it. Rotting garbage, oven warmed.
Leaving things they decided they don’t want just wherever in a store. It’s annoying as a customer, because now I have to dig through their mess to get the product I actually wanted, and even moreso as an employee.
At least put it back in the right department. The underpaid employees who have been there since before the store opened really don’t want to have to play the game of “How long has this ground beef been sitting in a produce basket, and how much product did we just lose?”
Shopping cart theory also seems relevant to this.
I remember a story of a guy talking about how the store reeked and smelled terrible. After doing tons of searching at the epicenter of the smell, turns out some guy hid a 5 pound beef brisket on the bottom shelf, hidden behind a bunch of breakfast cereal.
You can and will find terrifying things working in grocery.
I once found a pack of beef jerky that had become 90% mold. It was tucked all the way towards the back of the shelves, partially shoved into the crack between two of them. We had no clue how long it had been sitting back there, because jerky rarely needed a full teardown.
Dear lord. Please tell us more!
Found a package of ground beef randomly hidden in the very back of the milk cooler. Thankfully kept fairly cool, and still in date, but a customer had stuck it there because he wanted to come back later. He came back the next day and tried to file a complaint because it wasn’t there.
Fish left in the bathroom. Like, straight up a pack of salmon fillets, just left there on the top of the toilet tank. Our best guess was that someone wanted to steal it, but either couldn’t fit it or got spooked and just abandoned it. It was in a far corner, barely used bathroom, too.
Half eaten fruit or candy thats been shoved to the back of a low shelf. You know a kid did it, there’s massive mess back there, and depending on what aisle they hid it in, it might have been there for a couple days to a week. Once found a bell pepper some kid had chomped into.
This is more just “general trash”, but still not uncommon if your store has a hotbar: Stolen food containers. People grab their dinner, eat it throughout the store, and then just put the trash wherever. If you’re lucky, they leave it somewhere obvious. If you’re unlucky, you find an open container of half-eaten rotisserie chicken shoved into a vent after they turned the heat on for the winter. Going past the deli in my store has triggered minor PTSD at times. That smell… Just… Hot rot. That’s the only way to describe it. Rotting garbage, oven warmed.