You know what really frosts my flakes?
People who treat grocery stores like giant lost-and-found bins for food.
I was in Sam’s Club the other day when I spotted about $110 worth of meat sitting in the potato chip aisle. Apparently someone decided they didn’t want steaks after all and figured, “Eh, somebody else will deal with it.”
Then, today, I found a head of lettuce sitting in the housewares department at Target. Unless they’re making salad bowls that grow their own ingredients, I think somebody got lazy.
Those are just two recent examples.
I’ve seen frozen pizzas melting in the clothing department. Gallons of milk abandoned near the jewelry counter. Ice cream left on a shelf next to checkout. Pretty soon somebody’s going to leave a live lobster in automotive because they couldn’t decide between seafood and windshield washer fluid.
Here’s a wild idea. If you change your mind, take the food back to where you found it.
I know. It’s a radical concept.
Instead, people abandon refrigerated and frozen food on random shelves where it warms up and has to be thrown away.
That meat isn’t going back into the cooler, the milk isn’t going back in the dairy case and ice cream certainly isn’t getting refrozen after becoming vanilla soup and dripping over other items.
And who pays for this supreme laziness? We do.
Store managers don’t just shrug and absorb those losses forever. They build the cost of bad customer decisions into the price of everything else.
The rest of us pay more because somebody couldn’t spend two extra minutes putting an item back where it belonged.
We’ve become a society where people think cleaning up after themselves is someone else’s job. It’s not.
If you’re old enough to operate a shopping cart, then you’re old enough to return things you don’t want to the shelf.
Otherwise, don’t complain when groceries cost a fortune. You helped create the problem.
I am Grandpa Grumpy, and I suspect the dipsticks who leave frozen peas next to the blue jeans are the same people who can’t walk 20 feet to return a shopping cart to the cart corral.