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.
Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
51–60 of 231 posts
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#52After 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…
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.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#53Public 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.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#54A 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…
"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).
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.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#55The 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. See…
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…
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.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#56I 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.)
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.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-expir...
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.)
To clarify:
* "Use By" dates are legally binding and are placed on products that are dangerous when expired, for example raw meat.
* "Best Before" date goes on Tomatoes and other goods where you only need to indicate that product is fresh.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#58I 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.)
Same. In close to ten years, I've gotten one mixed-up delivery, where they evidently mislabeled my package with somebody else's when it went out for shipping. And one item that was lost in shipping and was never delivered, which they immediately refunded.
Otherwise, I can't complain at all. Sometimes, the stuff is crap, but you kind of expect that when you are buying cheap generic stuff - if you really want to see cheap junk, go to an Ocean State Job Lot or Dollar General.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#59After 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…
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.
Your local bricks and mortar store cares about monitoring its supply chain because it's on the hook for refunds and legal claims if the goods are counterfeit, defective or beyond their sell-by date. Amazon Marketplace outsources blame to the third party supplier (even when due to commingling it's actually not the third party supplier's fault...) which is usually overseas and with not much brand to protect in the first place.
Re: Amazon is shipping expired food, customers say
#60A 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…
If you create a listing that competes with someone else’s high volume product you will get fake reviews claiming the product is expired. Multiple times this has happened on a brand new listing with no sales, before the product even arrives at Amazon. Expired is one of the go-to false complaints.
In my experience Amazon reliably push expired product back to the seller, at least using the dates that were declared by the seller. This does not stop a seller from claiming what they like, I suppose.