It’s totally true. I’ve always liked the advice that you should mostly walk around the perimeter of the store, and only go into the middle part (aisles) when you have some specific need (canned veggies, beans, pasta).

It obviously depends a bit on your store’s layout, but I’ve found the advice to be almost universal. The aisles contain all of the junk (an unbelievable amount of junk), and the good fresh ingredients — fruit, veggies, dairy, breads, meats — are around the outside.

The Reddit link is irrelevant without knowing the size of the operation and the normal amounts of waste. If people think they can design systems that can predict demand perfectly and result in no errors, perhaps they should get a job at a grocery store or start their own.

The OP (who works at that shop and knows the demand and supply), explained in the post that they have a massive freezer that's mostly empty they could throw this stuff into for a day or so until it's picked up by soup kitchens.

The choice to discard perfectly good food is a diabolic one.

It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing.

You can choose to think that there are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger. Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason (aka probability and cost of liability is too high compared to throwing it away).

Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them, and it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business.

> It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing

There are other evil people out there so this is ok? Is that your argument?

> There are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger

What are they, if not evil, because that's exactly what they're doing... throwing good food away while people in the neighbourhood go hungry.

> Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason

But I have investigated the reason, and it isn't a good one. This food is thrown out BEFORE expiry date. This means that at the moment of destruction, it was completely legal to sell the food. If it was legal to sell, it was legal to give away. And I'm not saying that they should let dumpster divers just come and take what they want. I'm saying that there are organisations (soup kitchens, etc) that you can have legal agreements with that leave Amazon free of liability, just as if they'd be free of liability if they sold the food.

To not do this is evil.

> Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them

Selling food before it's best-before/expiry date is legal and is the core function of every retail business. They could sell this food for a $0.01 to a food kitchen and it would be no more a misstep or risk than if they sold it to any other customer.

> it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business

I said nothing of the sort. They know exactly how to run their own business. But they're evil people who are letting starving people suffer while they throw out perfectly good, FDA approved, non-expired, healthy food.