veteran+ wrote: ↑November 28th, 2020, 6:42 am
I have worked for Ralphs, Publix, Vons, King Soopers, Fresh & Easy, Food Fair/Pantry Pride and ALL of these companies have a Product Expiration Program. I actually created an exhaustively accurate one for F&E.
There are corporate and store level compliance checks in place at all of the above companies, in addition to County health department spot checks.
Something is going on at Kroger/Ralphs and it sure feels like the Ides of March. The signs are everywhere from corporate Customer Relations to store level managers and employees. I just do not recognize how they do business anymore.
Yeah, and if these programs are followed, it actually does work. In Smiths in my area at one specific location in the past two months I've seen while walking through grocery aisles random bagged coffee tagged with "reduced" stickers about to expire in the next month, random packaged private label cookies tagged with "reduced" stickers about to expire in the next month, and a few other things tagged this way in dry grocery aisles. Obviously someone there at that particular location is doing the section-based date checks (like they are supposed to be doing) and either getting rid of expired product or reducing the product that is about to expire. Because I have not seen this manner of reduction at the other Smiths locations on dry grocery.
But it seems like those programs are often not followed. I know there is a schedule by section, checklist, sign offs, etc...
Rite Aid (since they distribute most items one piece at a time vs. in boxes/cases) has an interesting expired items program which I am not sure where the data comes from, but they send a list of items that are potentially about to expire to the stores and the stores get a print out every week and go look for those items and put a markdown sticker on them. CVS program seems to be a pop up box on the cash register in certain item categories (baby formula, dairy, etc.) that tells the cashier to check the expiration date on the product at the checkout. I wonder how that works on the self checkout.
I was at another store recently (wasn't Smiths) and I found some expired items on the shelf. Didn't think much of it, but alerted someone. Nobody did anything about it- I went back a few days later and the stuff was still there. Finally got someone who actually cared to look at it, and they found 3-4 cartfulls of expired product after checking this section and were quite embarrassed about it. It was surprising but for whatever reason this particular category did not "empty the shelf" during the Pandemic earlier this year. And this chain's overly high everyday pricing, pricing private label items above name brand items routinely and not promoting them on ad, and staff that doesn't seem to care all contributed to what happened, and this was far from the first time I had issues with expired products in that specific store.
One time I worked in a chain and was in a ~1.5 year old store. We found an item (OTC Drug- value was less than $10) that had an expiration date 3 years old during restocking. We did not really know what happened, one manager assumed that we must have accepted a return on an expired product and wanted to figure out who to write up but immediately insisted up front it was not her who refunded it (...yeah, I know). Like it is worth anyone's time to make a big deal over a $10 item getting written off. Anyway, went into the POS controller and looked up activity on that UPC. Nope- we had only ever sold one unit of it, and never processed a refund on it. The count was accurate in the system vs. shelf, so not likely a refund was done using a generic item code/department key unless someone then went into the system and adjusted counts after. Perhaps a customer showed up and did a "self exchange" or the distribution center sent us a product that was that expired. But it was only one of the boxes on the shelf that was expired. The rest were not.