Surprise, surprise: the shitty produce goes to the poorer neighborhoods

Here is the text of the message I just sent to Albertsons:

Frankly, I'm really pretty disgusted with Albertsons right now. On Saturday night, 9/3/05, around 7pm, I bought a lot of groceries from my local Albertsons, including a lot of produce.

This included two heads of fresh garlic, for a total of $1.00 + tax. The next night, 9/4/05, preparing dinner, I started peeling the garlic for a pasta sauce. When I came across one clove beginning to go bad, with extensive brown spots, I didn't think much of it, and threw it away. Then the next one also had lots of deep brown spots. Then the next one was actively rotting. Then another with brown spots. In the end, at least half of both heads were actively rotten, or getting very close to it. I stopped peeling, cooked the sauce without the garlic, and put it all in a ziploc bag.

When I took it in within an hour to Albertsons, I asked to speak with a manager. I didn't just want a $1.00 refund; I wanted to talk to someone who would actually look at this disgusting garlic. At 7:30pm, I was told no manager was in the store for the rest of the night. This for a store open until midnight? Operating for four and a half hours with no manager or managerial personnel?

I was instead approached by the produce clerk, a young man who was pleasant, and apologized, but seemed mystified that I wanted to talk to someone about it, and why a simple refund wasn't sufficient. He told me that "sometimes this just happens" and that while that garlic should have been thrown away when it was being stocked, it sometimes just gets through. In short, he basically dismissed my concerns, and blew me off.

My concerns, which I tried to explain to him (notably, in a calmer tone than this e-mail contains), were this: this produce wasn't just bad, it was TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. It wasn't just a fluke: I've had bad produce on numerous other occasions from THIS Albertsons. In the past, I've just tossed it out, and written it off to "these things happen", as the young produce clerk blandly posited. I have now realized that it's a regular theme at this location:

And this is what is most irritating: the produce at this store is CONSISTENTLY worse than any other Albertsons in Salt Lake City that I have been to: older, less fresh, often bordering on rotten. It is also worse than Smith's supermarkets, the local competition. As I said to the cashier who gave me the refund, "Show me garlic like this in Sugarhouse". (Sugarhouse is a more affluent neighborhood, a few miles south from my downtown Salt Lake City neighborhood.) The cashier was very polite, and without obviously agreeing, silently ceded the point through body language.

So, I write to ask you several things:

1) Is there neighborhood profiling going on about where the old/nasty produce is sent, and/or how long it's kept on the shelf for sale? That is, do you send the bad stuff to the downtown store? Or the best stuff to the Sugarhouse (or other more affluent) stores?

2) Is it imaginable to you that no manager or managerial personnel would be present anywhere in the store from 7:30pm to closing (midnight)?

3) Do you find acceptable the explanation that "sometimes this just happens"?

I look forward to your response. E-mail is fine, as is paper mail.

Sincerely,
[signed, dangr]
Downtown Salt Lake City, Utah