Why Fred Meyer Called Police to Keep People from Taking Discarded Food
Twitter and Facebook are abuzz this week, talking about a story from OregonLive about a local grocery store manager calling the police to keep people from scavenging discarded food from the store’s dumpster.
The basic story goes something like this:
The area got hit with a massive winter storm and the store lost power. Store employees discarded perishables, everything from dairy and juice to fresh meat, in their dumpster.
Local folks heard about the good food being thrown in the trash can and began gathering to try to grab some of the food. The manager tried to prevent it and then called the police to guard the discarded food.
So Why Not Give Away Food They Can’t Sell?
In general, people sharing the news story were asking why the police would guard a dumpster and why the grocery chain would be opposed to letting people have the stuff they have to throw out anyway.
The cynical answer from most people is that the grocery store didn’t want to give away the food because there was nothing in it for them. Or, the shorter version: they were just assholes.
Let me preface this with I am not a representative of Fred Meyer, nor have I ever worked in a grocery store. And I know a lot of businesses that gave away food during the early days of the pandemic when their restaurant or store couldn’t open and risked food going bad.
But I do know what I’ve been told in the past and it makes some amount of sense. So in hopes of telling you that not everyone is just a jerk, here are some reasons why the store might not have wanted people to scavenge their trash.
Not Everything in the Dumpster was Storm Trash
Grocery stores throw out lots of perishables on a daily basis.
Chances are before the storm, the store had trashed, eggs, milk and other perishables that had simply expired.
If someone were to scavenge groceries from the dumpster, they might unwittingly get things that had actually gone bad.
This is a problem for two reason. First, the store likely doesn’t want to make anyone sick. And second, we live in a litigious society that loves to sue over everything.
If someone salvaged food that had gone bad, and got sick, the store and the manufacturer could potentially be held legally responsible, costing them bad press and some financial settlement.
The police, even when we hate them, are supposed to protect people and businesses. They were simply doing their jobs.
Likewise, the store manager has a responsibility to their suppliers and to his corporate overlords to prevent lawsuits against the store.
I know we’d all like to think that the people who scavenged the food would be discerning enough to avoid the rotten food, but that simply isn’t the case.
Not Everyone Scavenging is Doing it for Food
As a self storage manager, I’ve had a lot of different tenants over the years and learned a lot of weird things including how much people will do for money when they are desperate.
Years ago, we had a tenant who was a distributor for Pepperidge Farm. His job was to take new products from the warehouse to stores, stock the shelves, and then collect and dispose of stuff that was about to expire.
One day when I saw him at the dumpster opening up bags of bread before he threw them out, I asked why.
It turns out, at the time, Wal-Mart would refund expired food items if you said you bought it there, even if you didn’t have a receipt.
So he had experienced people scavenging expired food from dumpsters and then returning it to Wal-Mart for cash or even just for a replacement. That meant he’d be charged for the product even though it never sold AND charged for either the return or the replacement.
I get it, when someone is desperate for cash, whether its to pay a bill or feed an addiction or buy diapers , they’ll find ways to take advantage where they can.
For the same reason, he couldn’t just donate it to local food pantries. Some pantries wouldn’t take stuff that was at or near its expiration date and even those that did ran the same risk: people returning the food for cash.
He did donate what they needed to a local soup kitchen, because that way it fed the hungry without posing a financial risk to him, his employer or the stores that distributed their products.
He gave away tons of bread and cookies and stuffing mix and whatever else he had to neighbors and friends who needed it. He brought me boxes of the stuff and let me distribute it to my friends and family and customers in need. For those, he just asked me to mark through the bar code with a black marker.
Look Beyond the Headlines
When it was safe for them to do so, I’ve seen Fred Meyer’s parent company, Kroger, have massive cookouts at their stores to give away perishables that were going to go bad.
But when this happened in Oregon, it wasn’t particularly safe for the employees or the scavengers to be out on the roads.
Was calling the police to protect their dumpster full of wasted food the best optics or even the best choice?
No. Obviously, it wasn’t.
But the reality is that even getting that much food to local food banks would have been nearly impossible in the storm and most food banks don’t have the capability of storing perishables at all, much less a high volume of perishables.
Just this week, a food pantry in my community advertised on their Facebook page that they had perishable food that had been fine because the outdoor temperatures had been above 40 degrees. But the forecast was calling for a warm day and they had no place to store the food. They put out a community-wide call for people to come get a box or three of the food before it went bad.
It’s easy to be outraged at the store manager and the police for keeping people out of the dumpster, but maybe it’s time we addressed the issues of income inequality that make getting free food necessary.
An increase in the minimum wage is the first step. Call your Congress people and your local politicians to get them to help out.
That’s the best use of your outrage. Work to make a difference!
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