Things Grocery Employees Wish You’d Never Find Out

1. You really need to clean the lids of cans before you open them. Truly.

This right here is super important, and not many people realize just how dangerous this can be, after hurricane maria, lots of people got sick cuz of rat/mouse pee thing due to uncleaned cans.

Oh yeah, every fucking flat of tuna cans has one busted one. That shit is aaaaall over the other cans.

2. Your green leaf lettuce was full of spiders and various other insects before we cleaned them. Pretty sure we got all of them.

One time a customer returned a head of cauliflower that had an easy to overlook streak of rot down the middle. A coworker of mine cut into it to see the gory details but she got more than she bargained for. 100’s of baby spiders came skittering out. Luckily she hucked that shit in the trash real quick and tied off the bag before too many got loose.

3. I worked at a grocery store that couldn’t find any autistic people to hire.

It sounds weird, but the manager was actively looking for autistic people to bag the groceries because of how common it is. He was worried about the optics of not having any disabled grocery baggers and he even had me “spy” on our rival store to see if they also couldn’t find autistic grocery baggers.

When I went to the rival store I saw that every single one of the grocery baggers was autistic. I asked one of the grocery baggers what made him choose this store and he told me how much they pay him. It was way higher than our store could afford, and the rival store owners knew that. They were building a monopoly on autistic people in order to ruin our reputation. Our manager couldn’t compete because his store was much smaller, so instead he decided to pay some of us (including me) extra to pretend to be autistic grocery baggers. Also, I masturbated into a head of lettuce one time and put it back.

4. We touch everything. Everything.

All the cans, bottles, jugs, jars, snacks – everything you see stocked on the shelves has had at least 5 people touch it already. And we don’t wash them. That’s your job. Literally had a dude complain that I picked up his soda to bag it by the neck. Like, this is how I pick up every soda bottle? What do you think happens? They just float up to the shelf magically?

5. If you give the cashier anything to put back that’s frozen, it is 100% going in the trash.

In a very rare circumstance, someone is available to run it back to the freezers so it doesn’t melt, but otherwise it just goes into our claims bin behind customer service. It sits there until someone empties the bin in a few hours and it goes to the back of the store where someone else marks it as unsellable and throws it away.

If you give us fresh produce, popsicles, frozen pizzas, ice cream, anything that we can’t just set back on the shelf for whatever reason, it WILL be wasted.

6. I used to work in a produce section of a grocery store back in the day. So much of the food gets thrown out as soon as it’s no longer aesthetically in its prime.

Freshness vs. appearance can be tough. Rotten food is usually ugly, but ugly food isn’t necessarily rotten. I’ll pass on the strawberries that have mold in the bottom, but a wonky looking sweet potato can still make some good fries.