The Great Chicken Incident of 2011

[Dreamstalker]

...while there was a chicken in the store (extremely cute toddler with a lovely handmade detailed costume), she wasn't the cause, although her brother the lizard was chasing her about the store so I was corralling them.

Named so by the cashier that discovered it (one of the cool guys I was bagging for).

The store has a certain brand of boneless chicken breasts BOGO this week, so we were getting a lot of them through the line. Until he comes to one customer, who mentions that the chicken "doesn't look right" and smells a bit.

It's not stinky, but we can detect a slight 'off' aroma through the plastic and they are slightly discolored (not obvious, but not normal). So CC voids them out, and I get picked to run them back to the meat department.

Naturally, the packs are leaking slightly. Which I didn't discover until I had them in my hands; the meat guys let me use the hand sink and hospital-caliber sanitizer they have, and gave me a few pairs of gloves in case any more had to come back...I think I wound up running about 10 packs of chicken breasts back to be damaged out. I'm not sure what the ultimate resolution was, although I'm guessing they'll all be pulled.

[bhskittykatt]

Yucky. Might explain why they were BOGO, though. Gotta unload it all before it goes bad...

[Food Lady]

Ew. Glad I don't eat chicken. And I would've loved to see that costume. The brother should've been a cow.

[Pixilated]

What is it with packaged chicken?? At my former supermarket, we seemed to get two different sets of chicken packages: one type were very securely sealed and virtually never leaked, the other seemed to be much more sloppily wrapped and leaked more often than not. (Rightly or wrongly, I always believed the latter were packaged out back, while the former were delivered already-packaged, though I have no evidence to support this). I always tried to have a roll of produce bags nearby to put an extra layer of wrapping between the "Eww" the rest of the customer's groceries (particularly when they were also using the reusable grocery bags). It wasn't unusual to have somebody say "Thanks" when I did this, which indicates that customers did notice the leakage.

[Dreamstalker]

I eyeballed the other brands of chicken while I was back there/hiding for the last 2 minutes of my shift, and this was the only one that seemed odd. Either we got a bad shipment right off, or someone in receiving left it out longer than they should have. Sell-by date was still a week away.

The plastic wrapping on this brand was thicker/more brittle than everything else; the meat that's wrapped in-store never seems to leak (I always, always put the raw meat in its own bag just in case).

I gave mom a heads-up as she has to buy chicken breasts for a dinner for a client, and she says "I never buy that brand anyway".