On 8/23/2004, Tank wrote:

>This year, I have noticed a number of grocery stores placing
>trash cans next to their sweet corn displays.

<snip>

I haven't seen this yet in my town. My issue in this same
vein involves asparagus. It doesn't really matter where I
go, except for the farmers' market at the height of asparagus
season. The asparagus isn't prepackaged, but it is bundled,
usually with a rubber band. I don't know whether the store staff
bundles them or whether they come that way from the distributor.
Every bundle, which typically contains maybe 20 to 30 spears, depending on
thickness, has several "busted" heads, i.e. spears
that have gone to seed. It's this way at Safeway, at Whole Foods
and at the local "upscale" grocers.

At first I accepted this, as the busted spears appeared to be
evenly (and therefore small d" democratically) distributed among the bundles so
that all customers are screwed equally. More recently, I started simply
throwing them away before making my purchase. I
then came to think that this wasn't exactly the right thing to do, so
I pointed out my issue to the produce clerks in the various stores.
They uniformly said to just pull out the spears I didn't want and leave them on
the side of the display. The only point some of them made
was that some customers were buying the stuff for soup or to chop
up for a salad or something like that and didn't care about the broken
heads, not fully persuasive but not utterly invalid either.

As for cherry-picking the berry baskets, different answer. I'd prefer
that as few people as possible paw my produce. I have no idea
where those hands have been.