"Pennyaline" > wrote in message
...
> Nancy Young wrote:
>> "Pennyaline" > wrote
>>> They also spotted people, like mothers who give their children treats
>>> during shopping trips or shoppers who (can somebody explain this one?)
>>> eat while they shop, throwing their garbage into the barrel before
>>> leaving the store.
>>
>> People see a bin and they just throw anything in it. You should
>> see the shopping bag recycling bin at the store. Grrr. I'm sure
>> because of that the whole thing just hits the garbage.
>
> Oh, I know. But food donation barrels are clearly marked, and it's
> particularly sardonic when they are filled with food wrappers and food
> waste.
>
>
>> I don't care if people eat food in the store so long as they pay
>> for it. I know what it's like when you have to eat something
>> *right now* or it gets ugly.
>
> I hate following along behind shoppers who are eating and/or looking for
> something/something else to eat immediately as they browse the aisles.
> It's really irritating when it's happening in stores with restaurants or
> food courts, where shoppers are supposed to sit down, order up some nosh
> and eat leisurely rather than wander about grazing on whatever wherever
> (with cheese and olive displays for antipasti).
>
> It isn't impulse buying, either. It's using the supermarket as an automat.
> I imagine these people at the meat counter, ordering up the cut they want,
> the weight they want, trimmed just they way they want it, then telling the
> butcher "medium rare, please."
>
> But more irritating and aggravating than all of them is the mother who
> grabs a jumbo bag of cookies off the shelf and throws it into the little
> car on the front of the shopping cart to appease her bored and wriggling
> horde. What will happen next is inevitable, and I hope I'll be well away
> from the store by the time it strikes.
>
>
>
>> The woman who polished of a container of soup and put it
>> back on the shelf empty, that I had a problem with. It almost
>> wound up in her cart when she wasn't looking.
>
> There are plastic cups and spoons from the little deli and meat counter
> samples on every shelf and on the magazine display racks at the check out
> stands. Empty chocolate and candy wrappers are everywhere -- same with
> cookie bags and wrappers, sometimes pieces of or whole cookies are there
> too. I once pulled an empty milk container from the dairy case. I've
> watched people retrieve doughnuts and rolls from the self-serve bakery
> displays and stand there eating them while they snagged more for a bag or
> box. Oh yeah, I've encountered partially eaten doughnuts laying marooned
> on distant shelves. Still, the situation isn't hopeless. Remember that
> they do through some of it away... into the donation bins!

We have a Central Market here that has a salad bar, cold food bar, olive
bar, Italian food bar, etc. They have assorted containers, including little
ones intended for salad dressing. Countless times, I've seen people take
the little containers, fill them up with various things, then eat them as
though they were samples! I also spied a man eat a very expensive lady
apple right from the counter and throw the core in a waste bin intended for
whatever fruit they were giving out samples of that day. I gave him the
evil eye.

What I really hate is this store is very generous with the samples. They
always have several types of cheeses, some crackers or bread to go with.
Quite often they have chips and salsa, usually some kind of fruit. One day
they had every melon known to man. You could try every one of them. I've
seen samples of pasta and sauce and they almost always have someone cooking
meat or fish over by the butcher counter. So why do people feel the need to
sample the stuff they *aren't* giving out samples of? Grrr...