Things Grocery Employees Wish You’d Never Find Out

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.

7. potatoes come from under ground from like where all worms and nasty shit live

8. I worked for Publix.

We are not as happy to be there as we seem. We are the Disney Land of grocery stores.

When hired you are literally hired as the “talent”

9. As cashiers, we were trained not to stop shoplifters. We could literally watch you carry something out of the store, and we couldn’t run after you or tell you to stop.

They also aren’t supposed to do it because that job belongs to Loss Prevention people aaaaand those guys have very different instructions for handling shoplifters

10. The single most profitable items in the grocery store is a bag of ice, and a loaf of bread from a bakery.

Ice can have a 100% mark up, and bakery bread can be 90% mark up. People just dont understand where grocery stores make their money.

11. 90% percent of the time when you ask us to look for something in the back, we already know we don’t have it.

Go into the back, reply to a couple text messages, come back out, “nope, checked everywhere we could have more, were out.”

12. A good portion of whitefish fillets (maybe 40%) came to us with at least one worm curled up in them.

We did our best to notice them and remove them, but some go unnoticed. That’s just a product of living in the wild.

Also we talk about you after you leave if you were rude.

13. Buy the store brand/off brand basics, (milk, eggs, flour etc) It’s literally the same exact thing from the same exact place as the more expensive brand name stuff.

When I worked at a grocery store, we would occasionally get products with a label from from another store mixed in with our stuff. Also quite a bit of store brand/brand name stuff is made at the same facilities (with differences in recipes) This is not always the case but it happens more often than you think.

14. We get our produce delivered on the same truck as we get our raw meat and fish.

Not a huge deal to me but I always thought the vegans and vegetarians that shopped there would freak out if they found out our store worked that way

15. If you leave your cart in the parking lot, not in the corral, we all hate you on a deeply personal level.

The store is just disgusting. Clean everything when you get home. The people paid to clean after closing do not care and are trying to go home as quickly as possible.

Cashiers will notice you if you’re buying condoms or pregnancy tests, even if they don’t say anything.

If you are rude, we will talk shit about you when you leave. Just please be nice

16. When I worked for HEB, the ripped meat packets would go back to meat market and reseal it and put it back on the shelf.

You never know what kind of dirt from the belt that it may have been on.

17. Surprised I haven’t seen this after scrolling a bit so I’ll add it.

This is true for most refridgerated products(yogurt, cheese, lunch meat, raw meat, lunchables, etc.) If the package is expanded its either been left out at some point and put back or is on the verge of going bad. Yogurt tops(the foil) should be slightly indented, not ballooning outwards. Same with lunchmeat packs or lunchable tops.

18. Most grocery stores have bad rodent problems.

And birds. It’s very typical to see nests and birds in the ceiling. The rafters are usually too high for animal control to do anything about them.

19. They throw out perfectly acceptable food, just because of the date, and put it in the garbage instead of donating it.

20. Not a grocery store worker, but a chef.

From my experience, most of that fresh fish you see isn’t what it’s labelled as, or is a much poorer quality than it’s portrayed. From strained fisheries to outright fraud, unless you caught it or can run a DNA test, there’s no telling what that stuff really is.

21. Do not buy pic’n’mix.

Those sweets have had so many grubby hands rifling through them, flies landing on them when kids didn’t close the lids, probably sneezes on them…

just don’t do it.

22. If you sit refrigerated things in the freezer, we can’t sale it after it freezes.

We have to claim it out. Just put things back where they go and it will minimize food waste. But of course, customers don’t give a fuck.