Does oat milk REALLY go bad in 7-10 days?

[gbaji]

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.

You'd think that. Didn't comport with my own personal experiences. And I started asking around with various friends and family that lived in and shoped in different areas, and saw the same trend. Why that pattern existed is a huge question mark. But it definitely did (at least in my geographical region). Literally every single person who lived in a "high rent" neighborhood reported massive shortages that lasted for weeks and weeks for some staple goods, but every time I asked people who regularly shoped in "low rent/working class" neighborhoods, they had not experienced any shortages at all (well, aside from the whole paper products thing which affected everyone). What few things were missing were occasional and for short periods of time. Like "they're out of X today, but I go the next day and it's there" kind of stuff. I remember literaly going to my local grocery store every single day, looking for the same set of staple stuff and never finding any for weeks at a time. I distinctly recall going to a friends house and making this observation, and they told me their local store had all of it and they'd never not been able to get it. I literally drove by on the way home, and sure enough, I was able to buy eggs for the first time in like 3 weeks, along with a few other things as well.

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?

Could have been regulations, or "guidelines", or who knows what. It felt to me more like a delivery priority that pre-existed, and which was never noticed until there were real shortages. Which, as I mentioned in my previous post, makes a fair bit of sense. If, at the distribution center, they automatically load the trucks delivering to "strores in groupA" first, then load the ones to "stores in groupB", then "stores in groupC", and those groups align with economic strata in the areas they are delivering to, you don't have to add any new rules to make this happen when a shortage occurs. It's a natural result of the sorting/loading methodology you are using.

Pure speculation though. One of several possible explanations for what I noticed.

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.

Yeah. This is certainly another, and goes to the "consumption patterns" I mentioned earlier. It's entirely possible that the exact same number of each type of goods were loaded up and delivered to the stores in each area, but consumers maybe buy more of those things in some areas and less in others, resulting in shortages in the former areas. But you'd think stores would take into account the normal rate of consumption of each type of good and have that baked into their standard order set (no one wants to order more than they will sell, right?). So if every delivery was say down 20% on those items, you'd think the shortage would affect all stores equally.

It's also 100% possible that a fair amount of hoarding was going on, which would be felt more directly in areas with lots of people with greater disposable income who could afford to buy up ridiculous amounts of everything so as to make sure "I have enough". But I'm not sure how well that applies to the sorts of staple food goods I was talking about, which don't have super long shelf lifes, so there's a hard limit to how much hoarding helps the hoardee. But yeah, can't discount that as a factor either.

But in any case, whenever I did ask I always got the "we didn't get any delivered" answer. Now, it's totally possible that they were just lying to cover something up maybe? Not sure how that's better than "we got some delivered yesterday morrning, but were out by 9:30AM" or something. The latter would have at least clued me in on when to maybe try to show up to get there when there were goods to buy. But then maybe they were doing that intentionally to avoid having hordes of people show up and rush in when the doors open to get the just delivered goods. Dunno. Again though, none of my friends and family members who lived in more working class areas even noticed this, nor even considered having to figure out when best to try to show up to get things that were otherwise missing. They were able to just always get them and were never in risk of running out.

Lots of possible explanations for this. But again, without going into the specific "why", the reality is that all of it is ultimately driven by some sort of shortage going on. And I suspect that a lot of other issues we've seen with some grocery items (like mentioned earlier) are still related to such things. Don't want to get into the weeds of causes and whatnot, but that's clearly what's driving things like selling stuff later in their freshness range. It's not like businesses suddenly discovered the profit motive just in the last few years, so it's a bit simplistiic to just say "they can sell older stuff and make money", and blame it on greed. Um... Could have been doing that all along, right? So something changed here. Something that changed "we can afford to toss out any food that reaches this date" to "we can't afford to do that anymore".

The way I read it wasn't policies of the grocery store chains or government policies. I read it as policies of the produce suppliers the grocery stores in that area buy from.

Yeah. I"m not sure to what degree the chain influences the delivery schedule or priorities. But at least around here, usually the larger chains have large distribution centers owned by them. They get stuff delivered there, and then sort that onto trucks to deliver to specific stores owned/operated/associated with/by that chain. But I'm not intimately familiar with the process. So it's entirely possible there's some subcontractor involved and making these decisions. Not sure at all.

But yeah, the individual stores don't have any direct control over it. They get what shows up. I'm just not sure who specifically made the choices that affected that.

Back when I was rock climbing on a regular basis, I knew some very serious climbers who lived a very nomadic life style. They would travel at a moments notice to what cliffs had the best weather. Obviously, they couldn't hold a job for any length of time. They used to go dumpster diving and claimed that high end grocery stores like Whole Foods had the best pickings because those stores had the shortest expiration dates.

Whole Foods (or "whole payheck" as some of my friends refer to it) has an "odd" buisness model. They really target a specific type of shopper and I'm sometimes convinced that it's counterproductive, and yet, somehow they remain in business. It's "odd" in that they seem to target folks who want fresh ingredients, but want it packaged the same way the processed stuff is. Which is just... strange. It's like their entire business model is to grab people who grew up "cooking" boxed mac and cheese, but want to be "really cooking", so they separately package the noodles, and the cheese, and the bechemel sauce, charge 3x the total amount, and then have the consumer combine them together. Heck. I'm pretty sure if they thought they could get away with selling a pre-measured box of water for the consumer to boil to make their mac and cheese, they'd do it. I fully expect someone to link to boxes of water at Whole Foods now.

It falls in that uncanny valley between people who buy ingredients and then combine them themselves to cook various meals and people who want to buy boxed meals. At least, that's my impression. I could be totally off on this, but I've scratched my head for years trying to figure out what the whole "individually packaged vegetables/<things that aren't normally packaged like that>" is really about, and that's the best I can come up with. Consider me baffled.

I kinda put it in the same category as the Hello Fresh style meals. I get it. Folks who want to cook, but aren't sure how to manage their own grocery shopping so they basically pay for someone else to do it for them. It's a great step towards learning to cook for yourself. But it's ridiculously expensive, so maybe good for the learning period, but one should really just learn how to shop at some point. You're paying takeout prices for home cooked meals, which eliminates one of the main advantages to home cooking. I guess it's a step in the right direction to getting cooked food delivered, but only a small step.