Customers who dump stuff in the wrong temperature

[Auburngal]

Ice cream in the baked beans
Or find a cheaper pizza in the frozen section - dump the fresh pizza they had and leave it in the freezer or vice versa

So much money is wasted by customers who do this.

YOU picked it up
YOU changed your mind
YOU should put it back

One day I had to dispose of £340 of food - mainly meat which was dumped in the wrong temperature section

Stop being lazy

I don't understand why people would think it's funny? If you walk through to the plant section after meat then it's going to be a common place to put something after changing your mind but not wanting the food to be wasted.

@IdaClair how many people really want to shop on a small scale 3 times a week?
Most people want to do a weekly shop for convenience. They haven't got time to keep popping out to a small store to be personally served.
Your arguments make no sense in regards to what the OP is saying , chilled products are together so are frozen. If you change your mind on a pizza because you have found a better deal for pizzas 2 chillers along there is no reason to leave the pizza somewhere other than a chiller

I had a young man in my store who got two small bottles of pop and then found a larger one cheaper so just shoved them on the nearest shelf. Wouldn't have been wasted but we do get audited fairly often on the state of things and get bollocked regularly. So after a day of following lazy shoppers around I did say "if you can't be bothered to put those back at least give them to me so I can do it". He did look sheepish and put them back and apologised.

People need to realise that good service does not mean we are servants.

Reminds me of the time I worked for the Co OP.

Had a customer have a go at me at the till because he hadn't checked the details of an offer properly and picked up an item that wasn't supposed to be on that shelf.

Clearly, another customer had changed their mind about getting this item - it was a pizza IIRC, so they had at least put it back into a freezer, just the wrong one.

The customer who had a go at me and very charmingly abandoned his whole shop at my till, accused me of trying to defraud him somehow and explaining to him otherwise would not convince him.

I really wish people would put stuff back where they found it. It would solve quite a few issues.

It would help if all similar items were together and not some on the end of the aisle and others nowhere close. Offers being elsewhere can be annoying as can things like nuts being in three or four different locations. It makes it difficult to compare what's available and the prices so things are more likely to be abandoned.

I hate this too, and I am just a customer. I used to have an inward chuckle about it and think "decisions were made", but I can see how it is shite for the staff.
Not so bad if someone dumped loo roll in the wine aisle... easily sorted. I recently saw a dumped pack of feta... it was put in a freezer. Why?????

If I change my mind about an item, I always return it to where I got it from.

Do these people who dump things in the wrong temperature section do this at home? Leave milk on their worktop for hours? Put ice cream in the fridge? No they don’t. So why is it ok to do this at a supermarket?

Best thing I found in the frozen section was tampons! If i caught whoever did this they should try and insert a frozen tampon as punishment

Might be nice in the heat we have been having recently 😅

I think the people who do this just don't care.

But the thing is, this doesn’t just inconvenience the shop worker, it’s horribly wasteful. All this food will need to be thrown in the bin. I couldn’t get worked up over a tin of beans left near the coffee, but fresh food in the freezer and vice versa is a crying shame. What a waste. There are people who can’t afford to feed themselves. Shameful.
I don’t work in a shop but hate unnecessary waste!

So you are ok with wasting food then?

Agree, it is lazy and a waste of food. I go back and put it in the correct place if I change my mind.

In fact, if I have a slightly broken packet at checkout, I decline the offer to get me a new one as I know it will be binned.

I worked for Tesco for a number of years, and yes, this behaviour was endemic and endlessly annoying. I can clearly remember freezing my nips off rummaging in the main walk-in freezer looking for a particular type of pizza for a customer; he was so grateful when I found it, and I was pleased I'd been able to help.

A few hours later, a colleague brought the now defrosted pizza back to me - she'd found it dumped among the men's shoes in the clothing section. I could cheerfully have murdered the lazy twat!

I'm on the same page as you but agree woth another poster that the layout would be an easier solution for new stores. No access to frozen or chilled food until you've passed through a one way system then it's the last section before checkout.

Last week I bought a box of ice lollies from Asda... Got them home and opened the box to find that they'd been completely melted and then put back in the freezer! I tried melting and re-freezing them so the stick was in the right place, but it didn't work. They were twister-style things so it wouldn't have been very enjoyable to eat them all mixed together anyway. It was only a box of lollies but it made me so cross! And made me wonder what else this happens to - like meat 🤢

Some people are just arseholes

Whether it's dumping frozen food in the tinned aisle, leaving dog shit on the pathway, or booking multiple restaurants on the same night and choosing on the day; there's nothing you can do to stop this arseholery; all you can do is act as a good person, teach your children the same, and call out the shitheads when it's safe to do so

Can't get excited about this. Supermarkets mean customers have to do the legwork, finding, fetching and carrying (and, increasingly, taking responsibility for financial processing) themselves. But, they're not getting paid for it. So, if they do it imperfectly ... well, shit. What you going to do? Nothing. That's about all you can do.

This is why I sometimes think it’s better they don’t put things back in the right places. I thought if staff found something in a different section (fresh/frozen) they aren’t allowed to put it back in the fresh/frozen section. As someone with health issues especially gastro I want to be safe in the knowledge the food I’m buying has been stored correctly at all times and especially not tampered with.

Should have took them back. Might not be anything to do with any other customer. Shops and logistics/distribution are run on skeleton staff a lot of the time now - how else do you think the CEO of Tesco has doubled his salary during a recession - and stuff gets left for longer than it should away from freezers/chillers etc as a result.

I bought 3 boxes and the other two were fine, so I'd imagine the third one had been left out at some point. The supermarket is also about 25 mins away from me so I wasn't going to make a fuss for the sake of a couple of quid. I see your point though.

Asda operate a 20 min policy. Nothing chilled or frozen can be out for longer than that or it has to be wasted.

Fair dos. I wouldn't eat it if it had any dairy in it tbh, which I know some of them do.

I did take back a pack of soft blue cheese to m&S one time, because it was just round the corner from me. The manager apologised and invited me to choose another pack, and also to peel the wrapper to check it was ok first. Every single pack on the shelf had furry mould on it, not just the blue lines but actual fucking fur. He was quite perturbed and said he'd look into it - obviously this entire batch had been stored at the wrong temperature for a while, and he wasn't aware even though he was a manager. I do think it's worth directing shops to issues you encounter, if you can, because sometimes they genuinely don't know about them.

I hate seeing this in the supermarket it's such a waste. I always back track to return an item to where I took it from if I change my mind. I hate to see waste like this. So lazy.

Asda would offset some of the food waste with staff bonus

Jesus, maybe look for a new job. No job should make you this angry

I really dislike people who leave glutenous products in the gluten free section. Not clever. Also manufacturers who package GF and non-GF stuff in very similar packaging - Warburtons, I'm looking at you.