My best friends at the local supermarkets are Mark Down and On Special as I always aim to buy everything possible either marked down or on special, and preferably both.
How the supermarkets and/or their suppliers come up with some of their Use By and Best Before dates is a complete mystery.
On 22.09.2020, I bought a pack of Gold Kiwifruit which was marked Best Before that day and was marked down by 75%. So far only one has ripened and the rest are still rock hard.
The day before, I bought 2 packs of Coles Cocktail Truss Tomatoes which were Use By that day and were marked down by 50%. The remaining 1.5 packs are still perfect.
Yet they continue to put produce out on display which is not fit for purpose, such as broccoli which has been absolutely dreadful for many weeks, and is often already starting to go yellow and/or has developed rotten brown patches.
I bought a twin pack of Coles Baby Cos lettuce a couple of days ago to make a salad for dinner only to find the inside leaves were brown on the ends, so I took it back yesterday and managed to get a locally produced twin pack from Fresh Leaf Farms which I have never seen at Coles before.
Perhaps they knew that their packs were rubbish and had supplemented them with the local product.
And their practice of dumping the dregs from near empty boxes on top of newly opened boxes is an insult to customers. They regularly do this with loose mushrooms, snow peas, sugar snap peas, stone fruit and so on.
So whilst they are selling perfectly fresh products discounted based on their dates on a monkey see, monkey do process, they try to offset it by selling rubbish which should not be on display.
After I left Coles yesterday, I popped in to Woollies and noticed that they had 2 varities of family pies dated 29.09.2020,. The full price of each variety was $13.50 and the beef pies were marked down to a lower price that the chicken & leek pies.
The store manager happened to be working right there so I queried the anomoly to which he advised that the staff do not do the markdown pricing anymore. It is all done by their computer system.
I replied that they need to sack the computer.
