Gross Secrets Grocery Store Employees Think Everyone Should Know

Heading to the grocery store to do your shopping for the week can be a pretty mundane chore — but unfortunately, it’s one we all have to do to, you know, eat regularly and all that. It can become such a boring task that it’s easy to fall into a steady routine. You know exactly which food is in which aisle, you have a list of what you need, and you can kind of zone out while grabbing the brands you usually buy. In other words, you probably don’t put a lot of thought into what’s going on behind-the-scenes at your local grocery store.

It’s a store that revolves around food, so you’d assume everything is pretty clean and up to code, right?

Sometimes. But other times, maybe not so much… at least according to this Reddit thread. In the thread, grocery store employees spill on all of the things they think everyone shopping there should know. A lot of it is pretty gross, and most of it will make you change up your habits a little bit, both at the store and once you get home. It’s kind of eye-opening, in a disgusting sort of way! But maybe it’s better we know this stuff so that we’re prepared.

Of course, every grocery store runs differently, so this isn’t going to apply to everyone. Still — it’s more than a little interesting.

1. You should always clean the lids of any can before opening them.

Chances are good that you probably buy canned items and open them without a second thought when you get home. But Reddit user damelavenganza warns,

“You really need to clean the lids of cans before you open them. Truly.”

Uh, that’s ominous.

Expanding on that, user Alejandro4891 added, “I came here to post something similar. A lot of people in our warehouse used to stand on stacked canned drinks that were then sold to the public.”

“It wasn’t done to be an a**hole, it’s just that our warehouse was very small and we’d have to stack products on top of products.”

“Those stacked products were then used as makeshift platforms to reach areas that were normally inaccessible.”

2. You should also thoroughly wash all of that produce you just bought.

There are a lot of reasons to thoroughly wash fresh produce: you want to avoid chemicals, potential food-borne illnesses, and bacteria lurking around.

But also, bugs.

User MiikeCan said, “Your green leaf lettuce was full of spiders and various other insects before we cleaned them. Pretty sure we got all of them.” Yes, it’s normal for veggies to have bugs on them, but… ick.

3. The same goes for cauliflower.

As it turns out, certain gross bugs prefer some veggies over others. User JediAreTakingOver said,

“Earwigs love cauliflower.”

That is absolutely the last thing you want to see in your cauliflower!

4. A lot of people have touched your food before you bought it.

Remember to always clean and be careful about what you’re buying, because it’s been in the hands of many others before it reached your house.

User Mr_Archer1216 said,

“We touch everything.”

“Everything. All the cans, bottles, jugs, jars, snacks — everything you see stocked on the shelves has had at least 5 people touch it already. And we don’t wash them. That’s your job.” If you’re feeling like a germaphobe right about now, start rinsing.

5. Some of the meat is probably not quite as fresh as it seems.

When you buy meat, you should probably make it pretty quickly. User ullric said, “I worked in the meat department at a higher end grocery store. The marinated meat was meat that was old, but not bad.”

“Old meat that was about to go bad was mixed in with the ground meat, either sold as is or made into sausage.”

What?!

“It was suggested we tell customers the ‘best’ option was what was going to go bad soon or what we had plenty of so we didn’t run out.”

“None of these things are bad or wrong.”

“It is how we minimize food waste, and how we minimize wasting the meat provided by ending a life.” Minimizing food waste is good, but this still seems gross.

6. Cashiers can’t do much about shoplifting.

Good news for, uh, shoplifters? Most grocery store cashiers can’t do anything about it. User ferociousBirdThing said,

“As cashiers, we were trained not to stop shoplifters.”

They continued, “We could literally watch you carry something out of the store, and we couldn’t run after you or tell you to stop.” Most big stores have loss prevention teams that deal specifically with this type of thing instead.

7. If you change your mind about a perishable item, you should put it back yourself.

Otherwise the food will likely end up in the garbage. It happens to all of us: you grab a bunch of items, then once you’re at the register, you realize you don’t actually need something, or it’s not the price you thought it was.

So, you hand the item to the cashier so an employee can put it back.

That’s fine for non-perishables, but user StrawberryR said, “If you give the cashier anything to put back that’s frozen, it is 100% going in the trash. In a very rare circumstance, someone is available to run it back to the freezers so it doesn’t melt…”

“…but otherwise it just goes into our claims bin behind customer service.”

“It sits there until someone empties the bin in a few hours and it goes to the back of the store where someone else marks it as unsellable and throws it away.”

If you want to do your part to minimize unnecessary food waste, just make the trip to put it back yourself.

8. Ripped meat products usually get resold in a new package.

This is more than a little unsettling. User JunkBondJunkie said,

“When I worked for HEB, the ripped meat packets would go back to the meat market and reseal it and put it back on the shelf.”

“You never know what kind of dirt from the belt that it may have been on.” Yikes!

9. There are creatures all around.

Grocery stores are not immune to bugs and other pests. In fact, they probably have a lot more of them than many places. User HeftyPen said,

“Most grocery stores have bad rodent problems.”

Another reason to clean your cans!

10. A lot of the time, fresh fish is not great quality.

This is probably something that isn’t true about every grocery store, but it’s still worth mentioning. User Punk_Rock_Chef said,

“From my experience, most of that fresh fish you see isn’t what it’s labeled as, or [it’s of a] much poorer quality than… portrayed.”

“From strained fisheries to outright fraud, unless you caught it or can run a DNA test, there’s no telling what that stuff really is.”

11. The bakery items aren’t fresh either.

Your grocery store might advertise fresh baked goods, but chances are high that they’re lying. User ohwowohkay said, “Everything in our bakery comes in frozen, even the few things we actually do bake in store come in as frozen dough first.”

“People who have been ordering cakes or buying the Italian bread for years will sometimes decide to stop buying them when they find this out.”

“Did they think the 3 people they see in the department baked the 3,000 products we stock on the shelves from scratch every day?”

Good question.

Do they think there is an army of minimum wage workers hidden in the back lovingly kneading breads and whispering encouragements to cake batter as it goes into the oven?”

This isn’t necessarily gross — frozen baked goods can be delicious — but good to know!

12. The register belts are more disgusting than you think.

There’s a reason you should put loose produce in bags, because you don’t want them on the register belts when you check out.

It actually makes sense.

User NegativePrize said, “Don’t ever place loose produce (produce not in a little clear plastic bag) on the belt, especially on busy days.”

“Those belts get really dirty and I rarely have time to clean it while my register is live.”

“Not only does it make your produce dirty, but it slows me down.” It also slows them down!

13. The salads at the deli are probably pre-packaged.

You know those big bowls of salad at the deli? They aren’t as fresh as they might look. User kowalofjericho explained, “They’re all pre packaged and we just open bags and put it in bowls. Once we ran out of Potato salad and I told a woman that she should go to the cooler and take a pre-packaged one because it’ll be faster. She said, ‘I’ll wait.'”

“So I went over to the cooler, opened a pre-packaged 4lb tub and poured it into the serving bowl before weighing out the half pound she wanted.”

“The look on her face was priceless, like I just told a kid Santa doesn’t exist. I think she expected me to start boiling some potatoes in the back or something.”

14. Grocery stores produce a ton of waste.

Lately, there’s been a movement of people trying to be less wasteful when grocery shopping — mainly, by bringing their own reusable bags and trying to avoid unnecessary packaging.

But a lot of the time, the problem is really the store itself.

User McWhiskey said, “If every grocery store is like the one I worked at, the amount of waste they produce will negate pretty much any efforts you can make as an individual to combat climate change.” That kind of stinks!

15. You should know the difference between “sell by” and “expiration.”

You can help cut down on food waste by realizing the difference between the “sell by” and “expiration” dates. User Vict0r117 explained,

“Many products can be perfectly good to eat for up to three weeks past the sell by date.”

“Coincidentally, we dump out tons and tons of perfectly good milk every week and by law are not allowed to donate it or keep it ourselves. Always kinda bothered me that there are families in town who can’t afford groceries and there I was dumping out 80 gallons of milk that was still going to be perfectly safe and fine to eat for another 2 weeks.” That is definitely the worst.

16. There are a lot of chemicals on your produce.

In an effort to keep produce clean, grocery stores douse them in cleaners that are not good for you. User violet_wet_dream said,

“Wash EVERY PIECE of fruit and vegetable you buy. No matter what.”

“The chemicals used to make food ‘clean’ for purchase can make you sick. And the pre-cut fruit and veggie trays are the worst for leftover chemicals.”

17. Don’t shy away from store brand products.

And finally, some good news! You should be taking advantage of store brand products to save money. User Shay_da_la said,

“Buy the store brand/off brand basics, (milk, eggs, flour etc). It’s literally the same exact thing from the same exact place as the more expensive brand name stuff.”

“When I worked at a grocery store, we would occasionally get products with a label from from another store mixed in with our stuff. Also quite a bit of store brand/brand name stuff is made at the same facilities (with differences in recipes) This is not always the case but it happens more often than you think.”

We know what you’ll be thinking about the next time you’re grocery shopping. Good luck!

18. Every store has a different carbon footprint.

While some stores are the first to recycle and encourage customers to bring their own bags, or face an extra cost, others are so wasteful it will hurt you to read how little they care.

“If every grocery store is like the one I worked at, the amount of waste they produce will negate pretty much any efforts you can make as an individual to combat climate change,” one user recalled.

Another on the same thread had the opposite experience, writing, “At mine we recycle the absolute f*ck out of everything. Almost everything comes in cardboard flats and boxes with plastic wrap, or reusable plastic bins. Very little actual trash coming out of the place.”

19. Be mindful of what you do with the carts.

At this point, you understand how hard it can be working at a grocery store. The pay is low and the hours can be exhausting, so do your part after you unload your items into your car and put the cart away.

Employees have strong feeling about people who abandon them in the parking lot or fling them around and they’re not kind.

“If you leave your cart in the parking lot, not in the corral, we all hate you on a deeply personal level,” reveals one grocery store employee.

20. Customer service has seen things they wish they didn’t.

In perhaps the most disturbing thing ever written, this customer service employee confirms some crazy photos of items she has seen to provide a refund.

While her list includes human teeth, maggots in processed food, a whole dead mouse, and an entire dead bird with the feathers in a salad…

The woman warns, “Only pieces of glass were a great deal or when people actually got hurt or when their pets died because there were hard pieces in their pet food.”

This has left us speechless.

21. Some things aren’t as fresh as you’d thought.

According to one user, “The meat in the ‘hot meal’ section was often just about to expire.”

“We’d take chicken that was about to go bad/expire and fry it up and sell it.”

While that isn’t the most appetizing, it sounds a whole lot better than the stores that opt to throw out unexpired food, rather than donate it.

22. Everything in the store has a purpose.

While you may just run in and out of the grocery store without thinking much about the music, that detail is a planned part of your experience. One employee shared,

“We play a fairly mild mix of music, from classic to current, but nothing heavy and this is to relax customers, slow them down.”

They continued, “[A]nd hence they spend more time in the store and are likely to spend more.”

23. Your small talk might be a little tired.

We all like to think we’re hilarious, even if we’re telling dad jokes, but we’ve officially been warned to avoid a few that are truly intolerable to employees.

What are they?

These include, but are not limited to, “’Oh it didn’t scan! Must be free!’ ‘I only came in for one thing now I have a cartful!’ ‘I’d be rich if I didn’t eat so much!’ ‘I forgot my bags, I can never remember they’re all in my car/house/job,’” one user writes.

24. Beware the cheese.

This will make your stomach flip. We’re sorry to share this, but the sliced cheese you can order for sandwiches can fall victim to a disgusting practice.

But how pervasive is the negligence?

We hope it’s contained in just this one store. CaptPolymath, revealed, “While working in the deli dept of an upscale grocery store (think Whole Foods or Fresh Market), one of our nightly closing tasks was to collect all the pre-cut cheese wedges from the display coolers that had mold growing on them.”

Oh no, it gets worse.

“We didn’t throw away the cheese chunks, though (they cost $8 – $12 after all!). Instead, we sliced off the moldy parts with a handheld cheese plane, rewrapped the cheese in cling wrap and reweighed it for sale,” the user continued.

25. Go with your gut with expiration dates.

Several months ago, I tweeted about how horrible the @TomThumb_Stores near me is, regularly selling expired food. I received assurance it wouldn't happen again from corporate & the store's manager.
Well, wife went by today to pick up pizza dough. It expired over three WEEKS ago! pic.twitter.com/SVLDOcS2Nk

— John 15:18 (@N0tOfThisW0rld) July 30, 2019

A bad manager can cause a lot of damage. In fact, all practices whether good or bad typically start at the upper management level.

That’s why competent managers are so important.

And just when we thought nothing could beat scraping mold off of cheese and continuing to sell it was bad, cornboyisdank left our world’s rocked.

A young employee wanted to do the right thing while the manager wanted to save money.

The Reddit user shared, “One day I was in the back room making an order. This young worker [went] to the manager showing him a cart full of expired meats and dairy products. The manager demanded he put new dates on the packaging and not to say anything. I over heard everything.”

26. Don’t buy dates, ever.

We may never look at a date the same way.

It’s just no longer appetizing.

Reddit user MageLocusta said, “Please for the love of GOD always slice open a date before you eat them. Dates are often so infested with insects that people outside the middle-east don’t know a good date from one with 10,000 beetle eggs inside.”

27. This drives employees crazy.

While you would think coupons would be the most frustrating things that slow down the checkout line, employees say it’s senior discount days.

Reddit user cost0015 calls the older crowd every “employees’ worst nightmare” and claims, “we hate how slow and crowded you make the store.”

This seems really harsh, but okay.

28. The cleaning process is questionable.

I got sick just reading this. This employee reveals the cleaning regimen is abysmal.

“That freshly ground beef? Yeah, the meat grinder was cleaned with bucket of water.”

“That freshly fried chicken? Yeah the frier is cleaned by a couple scrubs and changing oil. Any type of holding dish (like for displaying meat or salads) or serving utensil, those are usually cleaned just with water,” says giraffe-with-a-hat.