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I live in a big city. My preferred grocery store is not by my house. But their vegetables are always fresh, you can buy things like milk, bagged shredded lettuce, etc with plenty of time before the sell by date.
Vegetables keep.
The store by my house (Food City) is low end, smaller, expensive and I think only exists because people in nearby apartment complexes don't have cars. The milk is sour smelling two days after opening it regardless of the date. Vegetables often go bad right away.
The Target by work is in an upscale part of town. Anything with a date will be out of date within days. How do they never have anything good for more than about four days?
I am sure it has to do with their warehouse and distribution system. Most are going to do it the cheapest way their customers will accept. The small farmer doesnt deliver to the retail store in the back of his 1948 Chevy pickup like in the folksy commercials. Most of your produce goes through many middlemen to the grocery chain warehouse system. Some of it imported from around the world. Produce tends to even be stored in low oxygen warehouses for many month to even out supply and avoid super low prices to liquidate inventory when there is a seasonal surplus. Produce so stored, once it reaches normal oxygen atmosphere spoils quickly.
If you have access to any produce supplier where its truly fresh/local, its worth paying the bit extra. Unfortunately the farmers markets (real local growers not the resellers of wholesale produce) tend to want to sell in tiny quantities in boutique fashion/price to well heeled customers. However you live in big city thats hub for wholesale produce pipeline, you maybe get some truly nice commercial produce reasonable. Probably more chance in such a big city, than if you live in some out of way, end of line rural area that doesnt produce veggies local. I have lived in some very rural areas where the produce was truly nasty. Small store tended to try and keep it on shelf long as there was any theoretical possibility some fool might buy it.
I live in a big city. My preferred grocery store is not by my house. But their vegetables are always fresh, you can buy things like milk, bagged shredded lettuce, etc with plenty of time before the sell by date.
Vegetables keep.
The store by my house (Food City) is low end, smaller, expensive and I think only exists because people in nearby apartment complexes don't have cars. The milk is sour smelling two days after opening it regardless of the date. Vegetables often go bad right away.
The Target by work is in an upscale part of town. Anything with a date will be out of date within days. How do they never have anything good for more than about four days?
1) Is the Food City located in Arizona? That sounds like a perfect description of the Tucson Food City stores.
2) If milk spoils after four days, I can pretty much say that somewhere along the line, the milk has been mishandled. Leaving milk out for 2-3 days at room temperature, the milk will lost about half of its life.
3) "Freshness" in groceries store is generally a function of volume. In my experience, Target is one of the worst grocery operations that I have seen. When you lack volume, groceries start to pile up at the warehouse and at the store. This leads to out of date goods.
Food, especially produce, comes in different grades. The different grades are priced differently.
Stores know what their customers will buy. if "cheap" is their most important criteria, then the store will try to sell the cheaper grades of produce. If their customer base wants quality and doesn't mind paying for it, the store will carry the better grades of produce that costs more.
Myself, personally, I like both cheap price and good quality, so I compromise and I know which store to shop at for produce that will come closest to what I want to buy and use. I don't buy produce at the store that sells scraggly produce that spoils quickly. But I don't shop at the specialty organic store, either. Their produce is extra nice but costs more than I want to spend.
Know what you want and know what your local stores carry.
Adding: some times it has a lot to do with the produce manager. Some managers take whatever is delivered and some will send produce back if they don't like it. Needless to say, the picky produce managers get the better looking produce because the wholesaler doesn't want his veggies returned as rejected, so he is more careful about what he sends to that store.
Food, especially produce, comes in different grades. The different grades are priced differently.
Stores know what their customers will buy. if "cheap" is their most important criteria, then the store will try to sell the cheaper grades of produce. If their customer base wants quality and doesn't mind paying for it, the store will carry the better grades of produce that costs more.
Myself, personally, I like both cheap price and good quality, so I compromise and I know which store to shop at for produce that will come closest to what I want to buy and use. I don't buy produce at the store that sells scraggly produce that spoils quickly. But I don't shop at the specialty organic store, either. Their produce is extra nice but costs more than I want to spend.
Know what you want and know what your local stores carry.
Unfortunately when it comes to commercial produce, nicer only translates to more "picture perfect" looking, fewer blemishes, more perfect coloring, etc. No commercial seller gives a fig about better taste. Better taste requires caring about things like soil condition and how ripe when harvested. More ripeness during harvest means lesser shipping and storage qualities.
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