Quote Originally Posted by gbaji View Post
Yeah. I tend to agree with that. There's no benefit to the grocery store to selling you expired product. To the degree that there have been changes over the last couple years, it appears to still be driven more by supply line issues than anything else. It feels more to me like they are finding they have little choice but to stretch those dates because it's taking them longer to get some products, so by the time it arrives in the store it's perhaps older (and less "fresh") that is used to be. I've definitely noticed this with some produce at my local store. The onions, in particular, often look really really ratty and pathetic. And while I used to buy 2 or even 3 at a time, I have learned to never buy more than what I'm using right now (no "put one in the pantry as a spare" bit anymore), because they'll be rotten in 2-3 days.

Food deserts aside, I have also noticed a trend with chain stores and different neighborhoods (and this may totally be some fu-fu California thing), in that it's often easier to find good quality fresh produce at the stores in the lower rent neighborhoods than in the higher. Could be a function of consumer pattern differences (but you'd think the stores would adjust to that), but I've been suspecting for some time, it's about policies in terms of which stores get priority on deliveries, and therefore where shortages show up the most. Which, to be perfectly fair, makes total sense. People in lower rent areas are statistically going to be far more dependent on the local grocery store than people in higher rent areas, everything else being the same. I just noticed this in spades during some of the shortages during Covid, where my grocery store (in a fairly high rent area) was just plain out of certain things for several weeks in a row (eggs, onions, potatoes, carrots, etc). And I asked. They simply didn't get deliveries of these products at all. Mentioned this to a friend of mine who lived in a more working class neighborhood, and he and his wife were like "what are you talking about? We've never run out of those things". So yeah, I just got in the habit for about a month or two of stopping at their grocery store to get certain things whenever I visited (which was about once a week).

But yeah. That sort of stuff is always driven by shortages of the goods in question. How that gets distributed is going to based on various policies. But it is about basic shortages. There's not enough stuff available to fill the pipeline with some goods like we used to be able to. So that's going to manifest in various ways. If you ran a store where you could only get produce at the very end of its lifespan, you'd remove the "sell by" dates too. Nothing too conspiratorial here. Just a natural response. And hardly something I'd blame on the stores themselves. They're just making do with what they have.
I'd be curious to see the logistics of that theory (not challenging you, just genuinely curious). If the grocery stores are all chains, I don't see why they would make the distinction of which location gets the fresh produce. And, though I don't like to admit it, you'd think the opposite would be true - that chains would invest their highest-quality produce in the place with the customers who have more buying power.

If it was instead a regulations thing at the city or state level, that seems fiddly and hard to legislate/enforce. How would a government verify that stores in low-income neighborhoods are getting the best produce? And, more tongue-in-cheek, why have I never heard rich people complaining about it?

My first guess would be that low-income families often have less free time, which means less cooking time, which means more prepackaged or fast food. That's a long-held belief that I've heard regurgitated pretty frequently, though a (quick, shallow) Google search tells me that equation isn't as clear-cut as I thought and home-cooked meals don't cleanly break along income lines.