Thought Provoking Thursday
About a week ago, as we were planing to have a friend over for dinner, I made the sad discovery that we were out of my homemade Alfredo sauce! Since my Alfredo sauce is to die for (in my most humble opinion... wink), I decided to pick up some of the key ingredients at Costco that very same week!
Because Costco is what I consider to be a high volume sales kind of store, I just assume that all of the products (especially the expirable items) will have a decent/standard/typical length of time before the product is no longer fresh enough to be consumed... 
I was SHOCKED to find three vary differing expiration dates for the heavy cream that I was planning to purchase. Look again at the three carton pictures, March 13, April 17 and May 1... WOW that is a BIG gap in dates!
If I had just mindlessly grabbed the first carton that I could reach, I would have brought home an old carton of cream! Truth be told, I still have yet to make another quadruple batch of my yummy Alfredo sauce, so having a little bit of 'carton picky-ness' has paid off since I have until May 1 to make it!
Are YOU a date checker? Do YOU even check dates at stores with high volume product turn over?
7 comments:
I always check the dates on milk because I notice there are differences sometimes. I buy the milk that will give me the longest sell by date.
I don't look for the longest expiration date with dairy. I just grab it because I've eaten every dairy product under the sun up to two weeks past expiration!
I absolutely check dates on pretty much every food item I buy. I spend a lot of time planning menus and occasionally I don't get to something I planned to make. I don't want to pull out that cottage cheese and week or two later, to find it's expired! If something in my fridge is getting close to expiring, I put it to the very front and that tells my husband and I to eat it asap.
PAM
I've always looked at dairy, especially milk, but I've been more careful since I started hard-core couponing. The cranberry juice at ACO Hardware for 59 cents and I have a 50-cent coupon? It had just expired. That's OK, because where I'm donating it to will use it quick. The lunch meat for $1 that expires the day you're looking at the product (all the packages)? Depends how soon I'm going to use it up. Maybe, maybe not.
I always check the dates. But, sometimes if I have the kids with me and they have the "Are we done yet?" or "Why do we need this" or "Mom, this wasn't on the list" attitude, then I forget and end up buying eggs that are almost unusable. Which then causes me to make a lot of cookies to use them up. Then I need milk for dunking. But I'm all out. So then I go back up there to get the milk. But unfortunately, I bring "them" with me. Which, then....you know what happens. It's kinda like "If you give a mouse a cookie."
I always check dates. Then when I get home, I mark them with the month/year expiration date with a Sharpie. If I can't find the expiration date (ie on Trader Joe's wonderful wonderful pumpkin butter) & I know that it's fresh (ie - their pumpkin butter was a brand-new shipment - I waited with bated breath for it to arrive in the store! :) ), then I usually try & mark the product with a 'B' and then the month/year. Which for me, translates to "I bought it on such and such a day." That way, when I come to it 6 months later, (if it's around that long) then I don't have to wonder when I purchased it & if it's still good.
Just a note - some companies like the organic ones sometimes have different coding which is very difficult to decipher. I ended up calling the company and asking if the products were still good (I got them on clearance).
And haven't you noticed some toothpaste expiration dates....AL 2011...I stood there thinking about the state of Alabama instead of the month of April :)
I do... and I always find that Meijer will always have already "expired" (they are actually sell by dates) of Dan-O-Nino. It rubs me the wrong way!! They were ALL old when they were 2 for $4 a few weeks back. *sigh*
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