18 ms·

Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say

464 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

donatj 7y ago
I’ve ended up with expired food from physical stores many times in my life. It’s not really a big deal, you just return it or eat it depending on the product. Same here. It happens. It’s harmless. If it’s a big deal to you, go to the store and pick things out yourself.
- goda90 7y ago
  You can look at what you're buying from the store before you buy it.
  - donatj 7y ago
    Exactly, so if it’s a big deal to you go to the store? It’s never been a big deal to me.
    - gbear605 7y ago
      If it’s a big deal to half of Americans, then that means something significant for Amazon
- grenoire 7y ago
  At a physical store you can check in advance if the expiration date has passed or not. You don't get the option to confirm it when you order online, however.
  - mrweasel 7y ago
    That's honestly the reason for me not buying groceries online, well that and shipping cost. Given the cost of shipping, I'd do one order a week at the most, but the I risk getting 5L of milk which expires within three days. If I only order once a week, then that is the minimum expiry date I'll accept on perishable food items. I don't blame the companies for wanting to ship the items that are about to expire, but please apply some common sense. If the amount is more than an average family could reasonable consume within a week, then may mix the items in with other with later expiration date.
- rambojazz 7y ago
  That should not happen at all.
  - donatj 7y ago
    Why? Expired food is generally perfectly safe. The dates are quality indicators, not safety indicators. It’s just being wasteful. https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/how-to-tell-whether-expired-food-is-safe-to-eat/ https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/how-to-tell-whet...
    - philjohn 7y ago
      Except when it comes to baby formula, whilst it might be safe to consume, the various nutrients required by a growing baby start to degrade past the use by date so you run the risk of introducing defficiencies.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        It isn't necessarily even that the ingredients start to degrade, it's just the date the manufacturer promises that the label will be correct until. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-takes-final-step-infant-formula-protections https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-takes-fin... (I get that this is a small distinction, but they likely aren't doing all that much work to extend the shelf life, they don't need to)
      - thrower123 7y ago
        Baby formula in general is probably best not consumed, if there is any way around it. In the best cases it's not great, and there are so many horror stories of it being adulterated with garbage.
        philjohn 7y ago
        Indeed - breast is best, but having two children, one of whom had awful reflux and just could not breast feed, and another who was fine there are good reasons that baby formula exists.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  It happens, but it's a punishable violation - the appropriate response is not "just return it or eat it" but an audit of the whole store and fines for having expired produce on their shelves, which is not acceptable. A physical store that does not have a reasonable process to ensure that expired goods are not available for sale is not qualified to operate safely, if it does it repeatedly, then it should be shut down - it's like a restaurant with rats running around.
  - donatj 7y ago
    In the United States at least expiration dates have no relation to food safety. Also the majority of expirations other than “Use by” are non binding https://consumerist.com/2008/06/18/is-it-legal-to-sell-expired-food/ https://consumerist.com/2008/06/18/is-it-legal-to-sell-expir...
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      Okay, that may be a substantial regulatory difference, in Europe it's generally not legal to sell expired food. (And to illustrate divergence, that consumerist article isn't available for EU users.)
      - rietta 7y ago
        I am not an expert in this, but I am aware from direct knowledge of businesses that collect recently expired foods (that are not yet spoiled - such as frozen) from grocery stores and transfers them to legal charities and food banks. There is a delta between sale by and unfit for human consumption.
        Merrill 7y ago
        https://www.stilltasty.com/ https://www.stilltasty.com/
        excalibur 7y ago
        I know at least one store that uses this as a business model. Food past its sell-by date can be acquired from grocers for little to nothing and resold at insanely cheap prices. The difficulty is in making sure your customers know what they're signing up for without loudly proclaiming that you're selling expired food.
Merrill 7y ago
On the left panel under "Seller" there is a Amazon.com check box you can use to eliminate third party sellers from the product search. I tend to select sold by Amazon unless the seller is the actual manufacturer of the product, e.g. a candy company selling direct through Amazon.
- derekp7 7y ago
  That doesn't work, because Amazon comingles stock. You could still get bad product if the packaging looks the same between Amazon's item and a third party seller's item
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    Not verifying expiry dates seems to be something that's not affected by comingling. What does Amazon do to ensure that their expired stock does not get shipped? Why does the same process not work for third-party goods?
    - Rychard 7y ago
      I would expect they handle this the way that brick and mortar stores do: estimating future sales and not purchasing excess inventory from the distributor.
    - jthistle 7y ago
      Here's what is _supposed_ to happen with perishable goods: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G201003420?language=en-US&ref=efph_G201003420_cont_200140860 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G201003420... tldr; Anything perishable is supposed to have several expiration date labels on it in large format, and nothing can be sent into Amazon that expires within 90 days. Amazon says they will dispose of anything received with less than 90 days remaining before it expires. There are a number of things that could be going wrong here. I operate a supply chain company which works with 3rd party sellers, so I'll focus on what I'm exposed to. One issue could be Amazon's labeling requirements. They actually require a separate label in MM-DD-YYYY format to be affixed to each product. This sounds good on paper, but in reality it means the seller or sometimes a 3rd party warehouse can put whatever they want on the label. Generally, sellers are honest about this, but mistakes do happen and Amazon doesn't necessarily verify what these labels say. Beyond that, commingling can compound the issue. Say you have 5 businesses selling the same product, and one of them is fudging their expiration dates. It becomes fairly difficult to track down which seller is fudging the dates. This is one reason I recommend all my customers not commingle their inventory (it's an option the seller can choose). Supply chains can also have wildly varying temperatures. Many sellers choose to work with climate controlled warehouses, but don't consider the trucks used to move their inventory aren't climate controlled. It's highly possible a product meant to be stored at 70F will sit in a 110F truck for 3 days before being checked in at Amazon.
arkitaip 7y ago
It's astonishing that even multi-billion brands are being tarnished due to Amazon's inadequate and sometimes even dangerous supply chain practices.
ilamont 7y ago
A data analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace recently analyzed the site’s 100 best-selling food products for CNBC and found that at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods. In other words, Amazon knows about the sellers who ship expired goods yet lets them continue to operate. It has the data and it still fails to take one of the easiest steps to address the problem, removing bad actors from the marketplace (which would also make many other sellers clean up their acts). I've had a similar issue with buying books advertised as "new" and they are clearly used ... including one book that had a "USED" sticker on it. I complained about the seller, and nothing happened. As of the last time I checked this seller was still in business on Amazon, with 22% negative ratings in the last 30 days. The message to third-party sellers is clear: Win the buy box however you can. We won’t police your listings. We won’t punish you if you lie about the condition of the goods. Even if many of Amazon’s customers are complaining about you, you can still stay in business on Amazon.
- amitport 7y ago
  "more than five customer complaints" Five out of _? We should care about the proportion, and should consider some time decay (maybe the issues were a decade ago).
  - michaelt 7y ago
    I work for a company that (among other things) sells food. The acceptable number of customers to send expired food is zero percent. It's not a complex or unusual requirement to make sure your goods are in-date - any properly designed warehouse management system will take care of this. This is absolutely table stakes if you're going to deliver food. Unopened baby formula has a shelf life of 6 months+ when properly stored, so they've got a gigantic margin of error here. It'd be pretty poor customer service to ship baby formula that only had 2 months of its 6 month shelf life remaining. There's really no excuse for shipping expired baby formula.
    - crazygringo 7y ago
      Actually, genuine question: how do you do that technologically? With multiple supplier deliveries that result in combined stock with multiple expiration dates, how do you ensure expired food isn't delivered? Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? And also, the expiration dates are printed on products in places that can be hard to find and hard to read. (Every time I buy bacon or greens I spent sixty seconds trying to find where the hell the date is on the plastic.) It's also generally not cost-effective on low-margin food items to print out and scan a unique label for each item that would allow the expiration date to be machine-readable. So I've always just assumed new deliveries try to be put in a warehouse bin behind/under existing items, and workers try to check visually for expired items, but that neither of those will ever be perfect. So what's the properly designed warehouse management system that solves for this?
dspillett 7y ago
A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in place on perishables so this aspect of the problem rears its head less often. [†] they can't, we as customers don't have access to the information to know the route items took to get to us
- mtgx 7y ago
  Commingling also sounds like an Amazon problem created by itself. The customer shouldn't have to care or even think about that.
- criddell 7y ago
  I think the complaints are perfectly valid. If you sell something on Amazon I believe you can choose to not have your product commingled [1]. If you don't do this, then you are accepting the risk that comes with commingling. [1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/how-to-prevent-commingling/316711 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/how-to-prevent-com...
  - froindt 7y ago
    Is there additional cost to not comingle? I can't find it mentioned after some searches. I wonder, at what point would it be economical to pay the additional costs to not comingle product? Would adding "For customer assurance, we do not comingle our product with other products sold on Amazon" yield additional purchases? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if nobody looks at your posting because it's 3-20% more exoensive than the knockoffs.
    - benologist 7y ago
      You can't have a "not-illegal" version for 3 - 20% more. The solution is to hold Bezos to the same laws as all other businesses so Amazon has appropriate due diligence instead of creating a quasi-criminal organization. Relentlessly apply the law until Bezos is working within it.
rietta 7y ago
This happened to us. My wife orders a lot of dog treats and human snacks on subscribe and save. They sent a package of nearly expired nut snack bars. Wife contacted customer service and they just sent another of the same. My wife is meticulous about checking sale by and it is a fight to keep her from throwing out recently expired foods. But I hadn't known a store to ship an expired product before this.
- lightedman 7y ago
  Sale By dates are not the same as Use By dates are not the same as Expired By dates. This link should help clear up a lot for you and your wife, and save you money/prevent waste in the long run. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/internet/main/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/food-labeling/food-product-dating/food-product-dating https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/inter...
- jakebellacera 7y ago
  We had very expired dog food shipped to us from Amazon, and luckily Amazon was able to give us an instant refund, but that was enough to prevent us from buying foods and other perishables from them.
- arbitrage 7y ago
  > They sent a package of nearly expired nut snack bars. So, they sent you an unexpired product, that you ordered? Outrageous.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    How close the expiration date is matters. Let's say the snack bars come in a package of 10 and the expiration date is 2 days from now. Do you want to be forced choose between eat 5 bars a day or throwing some of them out? If the alternative is to buy them from some other source that will give you a package that doesn't expire for 2 months (for the same price, all other things being equal, etc.), then that is indeed a more attractive offer.
gwittel 7y ago
Happened to us several times with our subscribe and save for baby food. Expired or near expired items. In the end we just don’t buy baby food from them. We’re shifting more and more spend away from Amazon due to this, and counterfeits due to commingling.
sdfsafsaf 7y ago
After so many stories and experiences with fakes, why would anyone still buy items in Amazon that are otherwise typically found in pharmacies or grocery stores? In my experience Amazon ships: Food that is expired or fake Drugs that are expired or fake Batteries that are expired or fake I've even received fake diapers! Very well done fakes too: we only noticed because of a very small logo that are included in the real ones. I use Amazon only for high ticket items that are unlikely to harm me, and then only because of their easy return policy (Epson, I'm looking at you)
- Finnucane 7y ago
  >After so many stories and experiences with fakes, why would anyone still buy items in Amazon Or just this.
  - Liquix 7y ago
    Because they have a crushing monopoly on US online commerce, and 80%+ of customers are happily consuming their cheap goods without knowing/caring about the quality/authenticity.
    - WillPostForFood 7y ago
      38% share (or even 47%) isn't a crushing monopoly. There are always dozens of alternative online purchase options. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer-cuts-estimate-of-amazon-s-u-s-online-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer...
  - fasicle 7y ago
    Still usually the fastest / most convenient way for me to get products in the U.K. I've personally never had any issues with Amazon in terms of quality, but would never buy anything from them I put in my body - I usually stick to electronics of value < £100.
- danesparza 7y ago
  Amazon just has a bigger target on their back. Why wouldn't these issues affect any business with a sizable logistics chain? There are no guarantees of authenticity of goods at your local brick and mortar stores either.
ada1981 7y ago
Jeff Bezos seems like a standup guy! He’s rich And built a tech company so why not let him do what he wants?
chenning 7y ago
The more I think about it, the differences between Amazon and Walmart are much smaller than I once thought. They're both platforms upon which sellers can sell goods. One of the bigger differences seems to be quality assurance. More specifically, to what degree is each company burdened with that important responsibility? If some manufacturer put something unsafe into a food product, I would blame the manufacturer. Seems pretty cut and dry. On the other hand, if Walmart was stocking expired food I would blame Walmart because they should be responsible tracking inventory and maintaining a safe environment. Seems pretty cut and dry. Why does Amazon seem different to me? More importantly, should they be seen as different?
- AaronNewcomer 7y ago
  It is different. This is talking about Amazon Marketplace sellers. It would be more similar to if Walmart set up a flea market with tents and stuff in its parking lot and let anyone rent a booth and sell whatever they wanted. Walmart would also provide a centralized cash register at the end of the parking lot where people could pay for the items they got from the individual sellers. Walmart would then settle up with the sellers at the end of the day for the sales they rang up for them, while keeping a cut to cover the cost of the transaction and logistics for setting up the tents and keeping security guards on site. This would be an equivalent analogy. Does THAT seem different than going into Walmart and buying from inside Walmart?
  - sray 7y ago
    Except it’s not like a flea market in the parking lot. It’s more like Walmart had a flea market, but mixed all of the items in with their own, inside of the store, and made it difficult for a casual buyer to tell the difference.
  - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
    Except in amazons case they take items from the tent sale and use it to augment their stocks in different warehouses so they can reduce shipping times. So in that instance it is the same thing regardless of “supplier middleman”.
- 7y ago
gwbas1c 7y ago
I don't get it: I've been buying Amazon prime for about 8 years now, and I don't encounter nearly the amount of problems that everyone else reports. Yes, I've gotten a few bad items from Amazon. I've also gotten bad items from brick and mortar stores as well. (I recently had a bunch of items go bad from Trader Joe's long before their sell-by date.)
- danesparza 7y ago
  Do you live near a major city? I've wondered if there is a correlation between incidents like this and specific cities or if there is a difference between more/less populous areas of the U.S.
- DanTheManPR 7y ago
  It depends on what types of things you're typically buying, there are systematic problems in a few classes of products. For example: board games and 3D printer accessories on Amazon are rampantly counterfeited, to the point that it's often difficult to get the real thing. You may actually have received a high quality counterfeit before and not realized it; for example, I used my Xbox360 hard drive for years before realizing that it had totally bogus identifier markings.
  - mortenjorck 7y ago
    The sophistication of counterfeit goods on Amazon is often impressive: For popular items like controllers for the Playstation 4, there are fakes that look and feel (and work) almost exactly like the real thing. The most sophisticated fake DualShock 4s come in convincing retail packaging, they pair with your console, and the only immediate tells (short of waiting a few months for various cut-rate components to fail, such as the battery) are things like the analog sticks clicking the wrong way or the silkscreening on the accessory port being the wrong opacity. At this point, if I'm looking for a popular brand-name product, and it doesn't have some impossible-to-fake functionality (like booting iOS), I assume by default that there are fakes commingled into Amazon's inventory.
- thrower123 7y ago
Scoundreller 7y ago
I definitely buy allergy pills off EBay that are close to expiry. But the vendors will state this. It’ll then take me another 4-5 years to go through the bottle of 500 :)
- fortran77 7y ago
  If people were selling expired or near expired items, clearly marked and identified, at deep discount, there would be little issue. But that's NOT what we're talking about here. That's a different discussion.
tjpaudio 7y ago
It's been my experience that nearly all items with expirations on amazon are either near the end of their shelf life or past it. Coffee, candy, supplements, whatever. It's very obviously used as a dumping ground. It's crazy to me that this isn't common knowledge by now.
- stagger87 7y ago
  I'll offer the counter anecdote. I've order thousands of food items off Amazon over several years and have had zero issues with expiration dates. I check any food item I think would cause me illness from being expired.
  - tjpaudio 7y ago
    Expiration vs. freshness. When I buy coffee or anything at a supermarket, the expiration date is about as far into the future as you can get. When I order on amazon, it's always much shorter. Coffee is a great example. It's usually months fresher if I buy in store. Not an issue per-say but you are totally buying the end of life stuff.
    - stagger87 7y ago
      Going by the expiration and sell by dates on my goods from Amazon I am not.
bArray 7y ago
Public service announcement: Always check your food, purchased online or in a shop. In both cases, you're probably hoping that some bit got flipped in a database (or somebody simply remembered) and a low-paid worker went out and checked the product's date. Accidents happen all the time. Scare stories: One friend found a live snail in her supermarket salad. Another friend found a cutting blade in a tin of cat food. I've personally purchased in-date bread from a shop and it was covered in mold spores between the slices. In a shop in Spain their milk had sunlight directly on it (and it was very hot), resulting in lumpy milk.
todipa 7y ago
I don't purchase baby food by Amazon. You can't trust the resellers. I don't understand how there aren't regulations on policing your marketplace for unlawful products, especially those covered by strict liability.
partisan 7y ago
I ordered a particular type of Hanes boxer briefs that are made from a breathable fabric and hold their shape really well. Instead, I got a pack of the roughest, lowest quality material boxer briefs, the likes of which you wouldn't be able to buy in the dollar store. I'm pretty much done with Amazon. They're betting against people actually getting frustrated and leaving, but I haven't ordered in a few months and I will get rid of my prime membership.
dwoozle 7y ago
If you know anything about Amazon, if you know what commingling means, or if you spend 5 minutes reading about this company you will steer well clear for baby formula, food, electronics, or anything else safety related. Stick to using Amazon for books, DVDs, and knickknacks. Target.com or Walmart.com will give you the same price as Amazon, with slightly slower shipping, and no Russian Roulette with counterfeiters.
- damontal 7y ago
  Walmart uses resellers and I’ve had problems with them recently.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Check out Target — they are ridiculously awesome. You can order stuff online and pull into a parking lot in a few minutes, with the guy waiting.
m23khan 7y ago
Frankly speaking, the amount of steps a customer has to go through to ensure quality from Amazon -- check out reviews for buyers, cross check prices to ensure you are not getting ripped off, check out estimated delivery times, and then as the article (and comments here) state, be on look out for expiration date -- for me at least, it makes sense to use Amazon only for books. Everything else, even living in the First World large Global City (Toronto), I find it easier to just go out to stores to do quick check and buy with piece of mind.
- brian_herman__ 7y ago
  Sometimes amazon even sells fake books! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...
  - strictnein 7y ago
    This is still happening. Just last week: https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1183094406573748225 https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1183094406573748225
  - rockinghigh 7y ago
    I can confirm. I received an obviously fake book that seemed to have been printed on a cheap printer.
- jimmyvalmer 7y ago
  > piece of mind ... said Bruce Dickinson!
fourier_mode 7y ago
> For one Teavana listing, the top customer review says the tea had a “terrible chemical smell” possibly from spoiled fruit It seems like an exaggeration, the listing states that the product got a 4.5/5 rating.(https://www.amazon.com/Teavana-Beach-Bellini-2-lbs/dp/B07B3Q6442/ref=sr_1_23?keywords=teavana+sugar&qid=1569934621&s=grocery&sr=1-23 https://www.amazon.com/Teavana-Beach-Bellini-2-lbs/dp/B07B3Q...)
- worstestes 7y ago
  FakeSpot apparently rates it as a "D" grade. Take that as you will though. https://www.fakespot.com/product/teavana-beach-bellini-2-lbs https://www.fakespot.com/product/teavana-beach-bellini-2-lbs
- nkrisc 7y ago
  All Amazon reviews should be considered highly suspect by default, until determined otherwise.
qwerty456127 7y ago
I wouldn't mind if these were discounted. Experience suggests expired goods almost always are perfectly fine although this is not guaranteed.
eric_b 7y ago
I canceled my Prime membership a few months ago. I never bought food on Amazon, but I received plenty of counterfeit or obviously used and broken items sold as new. I went back through my order history recently and it was over 10% of my orders in the last three years had issues. And I wasn't buying from the marketplace if I could help it. There are still some things I have to go through great lengths to buy other places (Furnace filters for a reasonable price, mouse bait station poison etc) but I think it's worth it. I don't give Amazon a dollar if I can help it.
- vegardx 7y ago
  Somewhat unrelated, how long did it take you to figure out how to cancel your Prime membership? For me it took considerable effort, to the point where it started to be funny.
  - warent 7y ago
    I canceled mine fairly easily a couple months ago. I can't remember exactly how, but it didn't seem particularly difficult. I do remember that they refunded the unused amount which was nice. Still though after being a prime member for like 3 or 4 years they've lost me as a customer since they allowed their platform to become an expensive Alibaba bloated with fake reviews.
  - Ancalagon 7y ago
    Somewhat unrelated note to your unrelated note, make sure you delete your credit card details. Every time I left the CC saved in my profile, and I cancelled my membership and cancelled auto-renewal, I would magically be charged a month or two down the line for prime membership.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    If a company makes cancelling their service difficult, or tries to "auto-renew" your subscription after cancelling, call your credit card company to report that you want your to cancel that service and don't want further charges from them.
- 7y ago
zaroth 7y ago
Expired products I feel a lot less strongly about than counterfeit. Expired products have a label on them that the consumer can look at and check. As long as Amazon is honoring refunds, they are financially incentivized to do what makes sense to fix the issue. If Amazon insisted on shipping an identical product out of a west coast fulfillment center to an east coast customer for which they had a fulfillment center 20 miles away holding the same SKU, they would not be able to offer the kind of service that they do. “Comingling” is the fundamental basis for them to leverage their scale to provide unmatched service. It’s essential to their business model precisely because how enormously valuable it is to Amazon and to its customers, and the way it gets better with scale, despite the concomitant lesser inconveniences. Fundamentally, Amazon still knows exactly which seller provided each buyer with each item, despite there being only a single shared product page. So they already have all the data, and of course they are using it internally to track per-seller review scores, refund rates, etc.
darksaints 7y ago
This isn't about comingling, even though it doesn't make it any better. It's about the fact that outside of Amazon's grocery-specific operations (Fresh, Prime Now, and Whole Foods), Amazon does not have a mechanism for FIFO or any form of decision making based on expiration date. All decisions are optimized purely on fulfillment costs alone. As far as I know (I've been out for three years now), they have no plans to change this, as it would increase their fulfillment costs.
eccodown 7y ago
Alexa, this 360-pack of coffee creamer is pizzled.
welder 7y ago
Related: 95% of baby food sold in the USA contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/files/2019-10/BabyFoodReport_FULLREPORT_ENGLISH_R5b.pdf https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/f...
deleted 7y ago
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jax2Brian 7y ago
I cant speak for every Amazon warehouse but @ Jax2 FC, I've personally worked a role in Vendor Returns, where we would remove, return and/or destroy expired food and candy that has sat in the warehouse for too long. Most of the food that was removed, was on its way to being expired in a few weeks and it was removed well before the expiration date. Some of it gets donated if its still good and the expired goods get destroyed in the trash. - BrianD.J, Amazon FC Ambassador
jeegsy 7y ago
Wal-Mart (or any of the big retailers) is that you?

464 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

I’ve ended up with expired food from physical stores many times in my life. It’s not really a big deal, you just return it or eat it depending on the product. Same here. It happens. It’s harmless. If it’s a big deal to you, go to the store and pick things out yourself.

goda90 7y ago
You can look at what you're buying from the store before you buy it.
- donatj 7y ago
  Exactly, so if it’s a big deal to you go to the store? It’s never been a big deal to me.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    If it’s a big deal to half of Americans, then that means something significant for Amazon
grenoire 7y ago
At a physical store you can check in advance if the expiration date has passed or not. You don't get the option to confirm it when you order online, however.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  That's honestly the reason for me not buying groceries online, well that and shipping cost. Given the cost of shipping, I'd do one order a week at the most, but the I risk getting 5L of milk which expires within three days. If I only order once a week, then that is the minimum expiry date I'll accept on perishable food items. I don't blame the companies for wanting to ship the items that are about to expire, but please apply some common sense. If the amount is more than an average family could reasonable consume within a week, then may mix the items in with other with later expiration date.
rambojazz 7y ago
That should not happen at all.
- donatj 7y ago
  Why? Expired food is generally perfectly safe. The dates are quality indicators, not safety indicators. It’s just being wasteful. https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/how-to-tell-whether-expired-food-is-safe-to-eat/ https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/how-to-tell-whet...
  - philjohn 7y ago
    Except when it comes to baby formula, whilst it might be safe to consume, the various nutrients required by a growing baby start to degrade past the use by date so you run the risk of introducing defficiencies.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      It isn't necessarily even that the ingredients start to degrade, it's just the date the manufacturer promises that the label will be correct until. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-takes-final-step-infant-formula-protections https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/fda-takes-fin... (I get that this is a small distinction, but they likely aren't doing all that much work to extend the shelf life, they don't need to)
    - thrower123 7y ago
      Baby formula in general is probably best not consumed, if there is any way around it. In the best cases it's not great, and there are so many horror stories of it being adulterated with garbage.
      - philjohn 7y ago
        Indeed - breast is best, but having two children, one of whom had awful reflux and just could not breast feed, and another who was fine there are good reasons that baby formula exists.
PeterisP 7y ago
It happens, but it's a punishable violation - the appropriate response is not "just return it or eat it" but an audit of the whole store and fines for having expired produce on their shelves, which is not acceptable. A physical store that does not have a reasonable process to ensure that expired goods are not available for sale is not qualified to operate safely, if it does it repeatedly, then it should be shut down - it's like a restaurant with rats running around.
- donatj 7y ago
  In the United States at least expiration dates have no relation to food safety. Also the majority of expirations other than “Use by” are non binding https://consumerist.com/2008/06/18/is-it-legal-to-sell-expired-food/ https://consumerist.com/2008/06/18/is-it-legal-to-sell-expir...
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    Okay, that may be a substantial regulatory difference, in Europe it's generally not legal to sell expired food. (And to illustrate divergence, that consumerist article isn't available for EU users.)
    - rietta 7y ago
      I am not an expert in this, but I am aware from direct knowledge of businesses that collect recently expired foods (that are not yet spoiled - such as frozen) from grocery stores and transfers them to legal charities and food banks. There is a delta between sale by and unfit for human consumption.
      - Merrill 7y ago
        https://www.stilltasty.com/ https://www.stilltasty.com/
      - excalibur 7y ago
        I know at least one store that uses this as a business model. Food past its sell-by date can be acquired from grocers for little to nothing and resold at insanely cheap prices. The difficulty is in making sure your customers know what they're signing up for without loudly proclaiming that you're selling expired food.

Merrill 7y ago

On the left panel under "Seller" there is a Amazon.com check box you can use to eliminate third party sellers from the product search. I tend to select sold by Amazon unless the seller is the actual manufacturer of the product, e.g. a candy company selling direct through Amazon.

derekp7 7y ago
That doesn't work, because Amazon comingles stock. You could still get bad product if the packaging looks the same between Amazon's item and a third party seller's item
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Not verifying expiry dates seems to be something that's not affected by comingling. What does Amazon do to ensure that their expired stock does not get shipped? Why does the same process not work for third-party goods?
  - Rychard 7y ago
    I would expect they handle this the way that brick and mortar stores do: estimating future sales and not purchasing excess inventory from the distributor.
  - jthistle 7y ago
    Here's what is _supposed_ to happen with perishable goods: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G201003420?language=en-US&ref=efph_G201003420_cont_200140860 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G201003420... tldr; Anything perishable is supposed to have several expiration date labels on it in large format, and nothing can be sent into Amazon that expires within 90 days. Amazon says they will dispose of anything received with less than 90 days remaining before it expires. There are a number of things that could be going wrong here. I operate a supply chain company which works with 3rd party sellers, so I'll focus on what I'm exposed to. One issue could be Amazon's labeling requirements. They actually require a separate label in MM-DD-YYYY format to be affixed to each product. This sounds good on paper, but in reality it means the seller or sometimes a 3rd party warehouse can put whatever they want on the label. Generally, sellers are honest about this, but mistakes do happen and Amazon doesn't necessarily verify what these labels say. Beyond that, commingling can compound the issue. Say you have 5 businesses selling the same product, and one of them is fudging their expiration dates. It becomes fairly difficult to track down which seller is fudging the dates. This is one reason I recommend all my customers not commingle their inventory (it's an option the seller can choose). Supply chains can also have wildly varying temperatures. Many sellers choose to work with climate controlled warehouses, but don't consider the trucks used to move their inventory aren't climate controlled. It's highly possible a product meant to be stored at 70F will sit in a 110F truck for 3 days before being checked in at Amazon.

arkitaip 7y ago

It's astonishing that even multi-billion brands are being tarnished due to Amazon's inadequate and sometimes even dangerous supply chain practices.

ilamont 7y ago

A data analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace recently analyzed the site’s 100 best-selling food products for CNBC and found that at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods. In other words, Amazon knows about the sellers who ship expired goods yet lets them continue to operate. It has the data and it still fails to take one of the easiest steps to address the problem, removing bad actors from the marketplace (which would also make many other sellers clean up their acts). I've had a similar issue with buying books advertised as "new" and they are clearly used ... including one book that had a "USED" sticker on it. I complained about the seller, and nothing happened. As of the last time I checked this seller was still in business on Amazon, with 22% negative ratings in the last 30 days. The message to third-party sellers is clear: Win the buy box however you can. We won’t police your listings. We won’t punish you if you lie about the condition of the goods. Even if many of Amazon’s customers are complaining about you, you can still stay in business on Amazon.

amitport 7y ago
"more than five customer complaints" Five out of _? We should care about the proportion, and should consider some time decay (maybe the issues were a decade ago).
- michaelt 7y ago
  I work for a company that (among other things) sells food. The acceptable number of customers to send expired food is zero percent. It's not a complex or unusual requirement to make sure your goods are in-date - any properly designed warehouse management system will take care of this. This is absolutely table stakes if you're going to deliver food. Unopened baby formula has a shelf life of 6 months+ when properly stored, so they've got a gigantic margin of error here. It'd be pretty poor customer service to ship baby formula that only had 2 months of its 6 month shelf life remaining. There's really no excuse for shipping expired baby formula.
  - crazygringo 7y ago
    Actually, genuine question: how do you do that technologically? With multiple supplier deliveries that result in combined stock with multiple expiration dates, how do you ensure expired food isn't delivered? Because I assume a warehouse doesn't keep a separate shelf spot for each separate delivery of a unique expiration date? And also, the expiration dates are printed on products in places that can be hard to find and hard to read. (Every time I buy bacon or greens I spent sixty seconds trying to find where the hell the date is on the plastic.) It's also generally not cost-effective on low-margin food items to print out and scan a unique label for each item that would allow the expiration date to be machine-readable. So I've always just assumed new deliveries try to be put in a warehouse bin behind/under existing items, and workers try to check visually for expired items, but that neither of those will ever be perfect. So what's the properly designed warehouse management system that solves for this?

dspillett 7y ago

A key problem with the complaints is that customer reviews don't† take into account the effect of commingling. The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations. Amazon will know but when you write your review or read someone else's, you won't. Same problem as counterfeit goods and commingling though iirc there are more control in place on perishables so this aspect of the problem rears its head less often. [†] they can't, we as customers don't have access to the information to know the route items took to get to us

mtgx 7y ago
Commingling also sounds like an Amazon problem created by itself. The customer shouldn't have to care or even think about that.
criddell 7y ago
I think the complaints are perfectly valid. If you sell something on Amazon I believe you can choose to not have your product commingled [1]. If you don't do this, then you are accepting the risk that comes with commingling. [1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/how-to-prevent-commingling/316711 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/how-to-prevent-com...
- froindt 7y ago
  Is there additional cost to not comingle? I can't find it mentioned after some searches. I wonder, at what point would it be economical to pay the additional costs to not comingle product? Would adding "For customer assurance, we do not comingle our product with other products sold on Amazon" yield additional purchases? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if nobody looks at your posting because it's 3-20% more exoensive than the knockoffs.
  - benologist 7y ago
    You can't have a "not-illegal" version for 3 - 20% more. The solution is to hold Bezos to the same laws as all other businesses so Amazon has appropriate due diligence instead of creating a quasi-criminal organization. Relentlessly apply the law until Bezos is working within it.

rietta 7y ago

This happened to us. My wife orders a lot of dog treats and human snacks on subscribe and save. They sent a package of nearly expired nut snack bars. Wife contacted customer service and they just sent another of the same. My wife is meticulous about checking sale by and it is a fight to keep her from throwing out recently expired foods. But I hadn't known a store to ship an expired product before this.

lightedman 7y ago
Sale By dates are not the same as Use By dates are not the same as Expired By dates. This link should help clear up a lot for you and your wife, and save you money/prevent waste in the long run. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/internet/main/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/food-labeling/food-product-dating/food-product-dating https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/inter...
jakebellacera 7y ago
We had very expired dog food shipped to us from Amazon, and luckily Amazon was able to give us an instant refund, but that was enough to prevent us from buying foods and other perishables from them.
arbitrage 7y ago
> They sent a package of nearly expired nut snack bars. So, they sent you an unexpired product, that you ordered? Outrageous.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  How close the expiration date is matters. Let's say the snack bars come in a package of 10 and the expiration date is 2 days from now. Do you want to be forced choose between eat 5 bars a day or throwing some of them out? If the alternative is to buy them from some other source that will give you a package that doesn't expire for 2 months (for the same price, all other things being equal, etc.), then that is indeed a more attractive offer.

gwittel 7y ago

Happened to us several times with our subscribe and save for baby food. Expired or near expired items. In the end we just don’t buy baby food from them. We’re shifting more and more spend away from Amazon due to this, and counterfeits due to commingling.

sdfsafsaf 7y ago

After so many stories and experiences with fakes, why would anyone still buy items in Amazon that are otherwise typically found in pharmacies or grocery stores? In my experience Amazon ships: Food that is expired or fake Drugs that are expired or fake Batteries that are expired or fake I've even received fake diapers! Very well done fakes too: we only noticed because of a very small logo that are included in the real ones. I use Amazon only for high ticket items that are unlikely to harm me, and then only because of their easy return policy (Epson, I'm looking at you)

Finnucane 7y ago
>After so many stories and experiences with fakes, why would anyone still buy items in Amazon Or just this.
- Liquix 7y ago
  Because they have a crushing monopoly on US online commerce, and 80%+ of customers are happily consuming their cheap goods without knowing/caring about the quality/authenticity.
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    38% share (or even 47%) isn't a crushing monopoly. There are always dozens of alternative online purchase options. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer-cuts-estimate-of-amazon-s-u-s-online-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer...
- fasicle 7y ago
  Still usually the fastest / most convenient way for me to get products in the U.K. I've personally never had any issues with Amazon in terms of quality, but would never buy anything from them I put in my body - I usually stick to electronics of value < £100.
danesparza 7y ago
Amazon just has a bigger target on their back. Why wouldn't these issues affect any business with a sizable logistics chain? There are no guarantees of authenticity of goods at your local brick and mortar stores either.

ada1981 7y ago

Jeff Bezos seems like a standup guy! He’s rich And built a tech company so why not let him do what he wants?

chenning 7y ago

The more I think about it, the differences between Amazon and Walmart are much smaller than I once thought. They're both platforms upon which sellers can sell goods. One of the bigger differences seems to be quality assurance. More specifically, to what degree is each company burdened with that important responsibility? If some manufacturer put something unsafe into a food product, I would blame the manufacturer. Seems pretty cut and dry. On the other hand, if Walmart was stocking expired food I would blame Walmart because they should be responsible tracking inventory and maintaining a safe environment. Seems pretty cut and dry. Why does Amazon seem different to me? More importantly, should they be seen as different?

AaronNewcomer 7y ago
It is different. This is talking about Amazon Marketplace sellers. It would be more similar to if Walmart set up a flea market with tents and stuff in its parking lot and let anyone rent a booth and sell whatever they wanted. Walmart would also provide a centralized cash register at the end of the parking lot where people could pay for the items they got from the individual sellers. Walmart would then settle up with the sellers at the end of the day for the sales they rang up for them, while keeping a cut to cover the cost of the transaction and logistics for setting up the tents and keeping security guards on site. This would be an equivalent analogy. Does THAT seem different than going into Walmart and buying from inside Walmart?
- sray 7y ago
  Except it’s not like a flea market in the parking lot. It’s more like Walmart had a flea market, but mixed all of the items in with their own, inside of the store, and made it difficult for a casual buyer to tell the difference.
- ganoushoreilly 7y ago
  Except in amazons case they take items from the tent sale and use it to augment their stocks in different warehouses so they can reduce shipping times. So in that instance it is the same thing regardless of “supplier middleman”.
7y ago

gwbas1c 7y ago

I don't get it: I've been buying Amazon prime for about 8 years now, and I don't encounter nearly the amount of problems that everyone else reports. Yes, I've gotten a few bad items from Amazon. I've also gotten bad items from brick and mortar stores as well. (I recently had a bunch of items go bad from Trader Joe's long before their sell-by date.)

danesparza 7y ago
Do you live near a major city? I've wondered if there is a correlation between incidents like this and specific cities or if there is a difference between more/less populous areas of the U.S.
DanTheManPR 7y ago
It depends on what types of things you're typically buying, there are systematic problems in a few classes of products. For example: board games and 3D printer accessories on Amazon are rampantly counterfeited, to the point that it's often difficult to get the real thing. You may actually have received a high quality counterfeit before and not realized it; for example, I used my Xbox360 hard drive for years before realizing that it had totally bogus identifier markings.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  The sophistication of counterfeit goods on Amazon is often impressive: For popular items like controllers for the Playstation 4, there are fakes that look and feel (and work) almost exactly like the real thing. The most sophisticated fake DualShock 4s come in convincing retail packaging, they pair with your console, and the only immediate tells (short of waiting a few months for various cut-rate components to fail, such as the battery) are things like the analog sticks clicking the wrong way or the silkscreening on the accessory port being the wrong opacity. At this point, if I'm looking for a popular brand-name product, and it doesn't have some impossible-to-fake functionality (like booting iOS), I assume by default that there are fakes commingled into Amazon's inventory.
thrower123 7y ago

Scoundreller 7y ago

I definitely buy allergy pills off EBay that are close to expiry. But the vendors will state this. It’ll then take me another 4-5 years to go through the bottle of 500 :)

fortran77 7y ago
If people were selling expired or near expired items, clearly marked and identified, at deep discount, there would be little issue. But that's NOT what we're talking about here. That's a different discussion.

tjpaudio 7y ago

It's been my experience that nearly all items with expirations on amazon are either near the end of their shelf life or past it. Coffee, candy, supplements, whatever. It's very obviously used as a dumping ground. It's crazy to me that this isn't common knowledge by now.

stagger87 7y ago
I'll offer the counter anecdote. I've order thousands of food items off Amazon over several years and have had zero issues with expiration dates. I check any food item I think would cause me illness from being expired.
- tjpaudio 7y ago
  Expiration vs. freshness. When I buy coffee or anything at a supermarket, the expiration date is about as far into the future as you can get. When I order on amazon, it's always much shorter. Coffee is a great example. It's usually months fresher if I buy in store. Not an issue per-say but you are totally buying the end of life stuff.
  - stagger87 7y ago
    Going by the expiration and sell by dates on my goods from Amazon I am not.

bArray 7y ago

Public service announcement: Always check your food, purchased online or in a shop. In both cases, you're probably hoping that some bit got flipped in a database (or somebody simply remembered) and a low-paid worker went out and checked the product's date. Accidents happen all the time. Scare stories: One friend found a live snail in her supermarket salad. Another friend found a cutting blade in a tin of cat food. I've personally purchased in-date bread from a shop and it was covered in mold spores between the slices. In a shop in Spain their milk had sunlight directly on it (and it was very hot), resulting in lumpy milk.

todipa 7y ago

I don't purchase baby food by Amazon. You can't trust the resellers. I don't understand how there aren't regulations on policing your marketplace for unlawful products, especially those covered by strict liability.

partisan 7y ago

I ordered a particular type of Hanes boxer briefs that are made from a breathable fabric and hold their shape really well. Instead, I got a pack of the roughest, lowest quality material boxer briefs, the likes of which you wouldn't be able to buy in the dollar store. I'm pretty much done with Amazon. They're betting against people actually getting frustrated and leaving, but I haven't ordered in a few months and I will get rid of my prime membership.

dwoozle 7y ago

If you know anything about Amazon, if you know what commingling means, or if you spend 5 minutes reading about this company you will steer well clear for baby formula, food, electronics, or anything else safety related. Stick to using Amazon for books, DVDs, and knickknacks. Target.com or Walmart.com will give you the same price as Amazon, with slightly slower shipping, and no Russian Roulette with counterfeiters.

damontal 7y ago
Walmart uses resellers and I’ve had problems with them recently.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Check out Target — they are ridiculously awesome. You can order stuff online and pull into a parking lot in a few minutes, with the guy waiting.

m23khan 7y ago

Frankly speaking, the amount of steps a customer has to go through to ensure quality from Amazon -- check out reviews for buyers, cross check prices to ensure you are not getting ripped off, check out estimated delivery times, and then as the article (and comments here) state, be on look out for expiration date -- for me at least, it makes sense to use Amazon only for books. Everything else, even living in the First World large Global City (Toronto), I find it easier to just go out to stores to do quick check and buy with piece of mind.

brian_herman__ 7y ago
Sometimes amazon even sells fake books! https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazon-caught-selling-counterfeits-of-publishers-computer-books-again/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/amazo...
- strictnein 7y ago
  This is still happening. Just last week: https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1183094406573748225 https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/1183094406573748225
- rockinghigh 7y ago
  I can confirm. I received an obviously fake book that seemed to have been printed on a cheap printer.
jimmyvalmer 7y ago
> piece of mind ... said Bruce Dickinson!

fourier_mode 7y ago

> For one Teavana listing, the top customer review says the tea had a “terrible chemical smell” possibly from spoiled fruit It seems like an exaggeration, the listing states that the product got a 4.5/5 rating.(https://www.amazon.com/Teavana-Beach-Bellini-2-lbs/dp/B07B3Q6442/ref=sr_1_23?keywords=teavana+sugar&qid=1569934621&s=grocery&sr=1-23 https://www.amazon.com/Teavana-Beach-Bellini-2-lbs/dp/B07B3Q...)

worstestes 7y ago
FakeSpot apparently rates it as a "D" grade. Take that as you will though. https://www.fakespot.com/product/teavana-beach-bellini-2-lbs https://www.fakespot.com/product/teavana-beach-bellini-2-lbs
nkrisc 7y ago
All Amazon reviews should be considered highly suspect by default, until determined otherwise.

qwerty456127 7y ago

I wouldn't mind if these were discounted. Experience suggests expired goods almost always are perfectly fine although this is not guaranteed.

eric_b 7y ago

I canceled my Prime membership a few months ago. I never bought food on Amazon, but I received plenty of counterfeit or obviously used and broken items sold as new. I went back through my order history recently and it was over 10% of my orders in the last three years had issues. And I wasn't buying from the marketplace if I could help it. There are still some things I have to go through great lengths to buy other places (Furnace filters for a reasonable price, mouse bait station poison etc) but I think it's worth it. I don't give Amazon a dollar if I can help it.

vegardx 7y ago
Somewhat unrelated, how long did it take you to figure out how to cancel your Prime membership? For me it took considerable effort, to the point where it started to be funny.
- warent 7y ago
  I canceled mine fairly easily a couple months ago. I can't remember exactly how, but it didn't seem particularly difficult. I do remember that they refunded the unused amount which was nice. Still though after being a prime member for like 3 or 4 years they've lost me as a customer since they allowed their platform to become an expensive Alibaba bloated with fake reviews.
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Somewhat unrelated note to your unrelated note, make sure you delete your credit card details. Every time I left the CC saved in my profile, and I cancelled my membership and cancelled auto-renewal, I would magically be charged a month or two down the line for prime membership.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  If a company makes cancelling their service difficult, or tries to "auto-renew" your subscription after cancelling, call your credit card company to report that you want your to cancel that service and don't want further charges from them.
7y ago

zaroth 7y ago

Expired products I feel a lot less strongly about than counterfeit. Expired products have a label on them that the consumer can look at and check. As long as Amazon is honoring refunds, they are financially incentivized to do what makes sense to fix the issue. If Amazon insisted on shipping an identical product out of a west coast fulfillment center to an east coast customer for which they had a fulfillment center 20 miles away holding the same SKU, they would not be able to offer the kind of service that they do. “Comingling” is the fundamental basis for them to leverage their scale to provide unmatched service. It’s essential to their business model precisely because how enormously valuable it is to Amazon and to its customers, and the way it gets better with scale, despite the concomitant lesser inconveniences. Fundamentally, Amazon still knows exactly which seller provided each buyer with each item, despite there being only a single shared product page. So they already have all the data, and of course they are using it internally to track per-seller review scores, refund rates, etc.

darksaints 7y ago

This isn't about comingling, even though it doesn't make it any better. It's about the fact that outside of Amazon's grocery-specific operations (Fresh, Prime Now, and Whole Foods), Amazon does not have a mechanism for FIFO or any form of decision making based on expiration date. All decisions are optimized purely on fulfillment costs alone. As far as I know (I've been out for three years now), they have no plans to change this, as it would increase their fulfillment costs.

eccodown 7y ago

Alexa, this 360-pack of coffee creamer is pizzled.

welder 7y ago

Related: 95% of baby food sold in the USA contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/files/2019-10/BabyFoodReport_FULLREPORT_ENGLISH_R5b.pdf https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/f...

deleted 7y ago

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jax2Brian 7y ago

I cant speak for every Amazon warehouse but @ Jax2 FC, I've personally worked a role in Vendor Returns, where we would remove, return and/or destroy expired food and candy that has sat in the warehouse for too long. Most of the food that was removed, was on its way to being expired in a few weeks and it was removed well before the expiration date. Some of it gets donated if its still good and the expired goods get destroyed in the trash. - BrianD.J, Amazon FC Ambassador

jeegsy 7y ago

Wal-Mart (or any of the big retailers) is that you?