I know that "past the best-by date" doesn't necessarily mean "unsafe" or illegal to sell. And to be fair, most of what I'm talking about is canned/jarred sort of stuff that probably is pretty decent for a good amount of time after the best-by date.

But...

I used to do my regular shopping at the place within walking distance of my house, but they had kindof a scandal and were terribly mismanaged and just within the last few years, it became clear it was no longer safe to eat food from there. (Not just "past its best-by date", though that definitely started happening. "Fresh" produce isn't fresh and smells terrible already on the shelf, cheese is moldy on the shelf even when it isn't past its date, etc.) They're still open (they do have the advantage of being the closest grocery store to a big highway for folks driving through/near my town not familiar enough with my town to know better) but it's very clear that their customer base has shrunk drastically and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole chain closed or sold or some such in the near-ish future. Before they went down hill, I don't think I'd ever really seen anything on the shelf that was past the best-by date at that store or any other. Maybe extremely infrequently at most, and it was usually because something was obviously "lost" somehow. Kicked under a display case or way in the back of the shelf in the wrong section of the store behind stuff that stays stocked up or some such.

So I switched my regular shopping routine to the fancy new grocery store a little bit further away. (This location was built within the last 5 years and I started shopping there pretty exclusively about 2 or 3 years ago.) It's fairly ritzy. (There was a time when I would have called the other store "ritzy" as well.) But tons of stuff is past its best-by date on the shelves. Dry/powdered spices, condiments (hot sauces in particular), jarred pickled stuff, etc. All months or sometimes years past their best-by dates. But even the things that aren't already past their best-by dates are hard to get with a decent best-by or expiration date. Milk in particular is often hard to find with an expiration date more than a week out (and usually milk does start to taste off like a day or two after that expiration date at most), so I tend to buy it in quarts.

(I also know there are stores dedicated to dumping substandard/old food on poorer communities for a lower price. But I really don't think that's a factor here.)

I dunno. Just seems weird compared to my previous experience to see things on the store shelves already past their best-by date. Do you folks avoid buying things from the grocery store that are past their best-by dates?

I'm in the U.S. midwest if that makes a difference. And I wonder if the fucking tariffs might be a big factor in that. Maybe keeping things on the shelf past their best-by dates is a way to reduce the costs for the store while they're having to pay a lot more for goods, allowing them to pass the cost on to consumers partially in the form of lower-quality, less fresh food so they can reduce how much of the cost they pass on to customers in the form of prices going up.

Or maybe this has always been more common than I realized and I've just gotten more observant more recently. 🤷

Edit: Ok, I'll name and shame. I guess I only avoided doing so to avoid doxing myself, but yeah. The first store I mentioned that is just terrible is a Price Cutter location. The second store is a HyVee.