Rotten Tomatoes

[MisseLaneius]

On the flip side, you get a lot of good food that gets thrown away... and goes rotten in the garbage bin instead of before.

Not that I go dumpster diving or anything...

[marty]

Ugh. I've gone on the mac and cheese and hotdog diet before because I didn't have any money besides change, but I've never eaten rotten food. Bleh.

[Norton]

Ugh! I can't stand the thought of someone purposely eating rotten tomatoes! I once had a burger with a rotten tomato slice on it - it looked fine, but the taste betrayed it. Nastiest thing I've ever had in my mouth. The fact that this lady would willingly eat them? ...


I had similiar things happen when I worked at Krispy Kreme. We'd ship doughnuts to local stores daily, and they'd return whatever expired doughnuts they had. We had no room in the store for all the waste, so we'd pile the boxes outside by the dumpster until someone had a chance to throw them away. I can't believe how many times I'd have to stop people from taking them!

"Sir, please put that back! We don't want you getting sick from eating expired product!"

They were nasty, too. All wrinkly and shrunken and slimy. The things people will do to try to save a buck.

[starglitter]

This happened today and I just have to share it!

We have this woman who comes into our store several times a week. We call her the Coupon Lady because 1) she'll cut out coupons then bring in weeks old receipts in which she bought the items the coupons are for, and try to get a refund and 2) In our meat department, when meat is about to expire they put coupons on them and she'll take them off and stick them on whatever meat she's buying. She also brings back half eaten food and tries to get a refund because her husband didn't like it. Our store doesn't do that.

Anyway, last week she pulled the meat coupon thing and we caught her. So today when she came in again, we were watching her back in the meat department in case she tried to do it again. We should have been watching her in produce. Apparently, when she was back in produce, the produce manager had this cart which she was filling with rotten vegetables to throw away. Well, the Coupon Lady tried to convince our produce manager to give them to her for free. The produce manager told her no, she can't give her rotten food. This is where it gets a bit fuzzy because I'm not sure how the Coupon Lady got the rotten tomatoes, but she did. She hid them in her cart under the bags she brought.

Now, like I said, we were keeping an eye on her to see if she pulled anything so when Coupon Lady came up to check out, the Front End Monitor went to keep an eye on her. And that's when she spotted the rotten tomatoes.

So our FEM is like "Excuse me, you forgot to pay for these."

The Coupon Lady starts patting her on the back and says "Oh honey, you should just let me have these. They were going to throw them away anyway."

At that point our FEM was like, look they're rotten and we can't take the chance of you eating them and getting sick and if I let you have them, that would be stealing.

Well Coupon Lady starts saying how she could get sick off of anything in this store and that she'll just eat around the rotten parts. Then she says "Can't you take them outside and throw them into the garbage? Then I can just get them out of there."

Just by chance our produce manager was up front at that point and she just came over, took the tomatoes, opened the package and poured them into the trash in front of the store managers office.