The Great Ham Caper

[Ben_Who]

A....a thirty-five...dollar...ham?

Sniff...snivel...WAAAAH!

Sorry. I recently added ham to my cooking repertoire and discovered the value of good ingredients in a six-dollar untrimmed salt-cured pork shoulder.

I could probably excuse canned goods, but those who leave perishables around to rot, especially expensive ones, should be turfed. They're contributing to shrink as surely as any shoplifter. In fact, I'll be a little controversial here and say that in some ways it's actually worse than shoplifting, because a) it's not seen as theft, since they didn't keep the item, and b) they get none of the benefit though they deprive the store of the profit of it. At least with shoplifting, there's a logic leading to a motive.

A thirty-five dollar ham? Good GAWD. Time to take that person's rewards card away.

Love, Who?

[Grape The Cat]

I found an open yogurt container with the dry dog food.

[Kogarashi]

Try a dripping meat package nestled on an upper shelf amid all the paper sacks of white sugar. I ran for an associate as fast as I could when I found that nasty mess.

[Kristev]

I've seen it all as a janitor for the little shop of horrors.

[mharbourgirl]

My guess is that these people think 'I'm not paying for it, therefore it's not my loss if it goes off' (that's supposing they think at all, of course).
The fact that (as the OP pointed out) they do pay for it in the long term, as do we all, doesn't occur to them.

You know, I'm not sure they even think THAT much about it. Because the one thing I am absolutely certain off is that people are fookin' LAZY.

"Oh, I don't want this any more."

*take item out of cart, toss it on the nearest shelf*

Making the effort to put it back where they got it is way more effort than a lot of people are interested in exerting, as all the experiences recorded on this thread alone indicate.

[klhanson]

ham and other selected meats..

We recently had someone leave a cart overflowing with different meat products just sitting in an aisle at my store.. well over $200 worth of meat that had to get thrown out..