this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
285 points (97.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35838 readers
1284 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have no reason to doubt what you're saying, but I really have to say this is the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard. The whole idea of putting expiration dates on products (and nutritional info for that matter) is for consumers to be able to interpret this stuff. Not manufacturers and not store managers. Consumers. There's no excuse for allowing this.
No arguments that it's shifty and dumb, but it's better if the store can be held liable for selling bad product. That said, almost anything with "best by" as opposed to "expired by" is still safe to eat for probably decades.
Wow that's stupid as fuck
No, best before is for the market, it was never intended for customers, that's not the date the food goes bad, it's the date it starts to be different from their best, e.g. a bread might become harder than intended, so it's meant to have the store sell it on pristine condition. Use by date is the one that is for customers.
Well, that would be the reason if they were legally required to do so, but Baby Food is the only product in the US legally required to have an expiration date.
So, all the other food manufacturers voluntarily put expiration dates on, and they want you to buy more food, so the date on most packages is functionally meaningless
I don't know about today, but in the past New Jersey required that "expiration dates" be stamped on bottled water: https://nj1015.com/does-bottled-water-expire-nj-was-the-only-state-that-thought-so/
Even if similar markings are not required by law everywhere in the USA, food manufacturers are probably afraid of getting sued due to violating local laws, or even international laws if the food is transported across borders, so it's probably negligent to neglect printing them.
Like the other comment here says, no it wasn't. It's useful for the store to guarantee it's good, but customers should be ignoring them as using the senses we evolved to use to detect bad food. A store can't rely on this, partially for liability, partially for speed and consistency, but also largely because they can't open the packaging to smell it or look at it better.
If I as a buyer can't tell the difference between fresh and expired food before I buy it, then what's the store's incentive to not sell me something a few days or weeks after its sell-by date? Even if they want to, they can't keep track of every product on the shelves (I've encountered items past their date on shelves a number of times, sometimes significantly so) and they certainly don't check each item's date at checkout. If customers can't do the check as they shop, there's no way to protect against it. And just kick the shop, customers can't open the packaging before they buy.
I do realise based on your comment and others that I may have been wrong (probably country dependent), printed dates might be intended more for stock keepers than for consumers, but that doesn't mean it's okay to hide this information from buyers.
I'd imagine the fact that is not legal and is negligent would stop them.