Consumer demand drives waste. We are splitting more and more into two groups; those who can afford to shop at grocery stores and those who cannot.
Those who can, still operate the same old American way as usual. Everything must be available all the time and all must look perfect.
This strongly affects stores that sell perishable items, which is why produce can be one of the best trashpicker scores.
It forces the stores to overstock, and to throw away anything with any cosmetic problems, in order to be competitive. This in turn creates a management problem for the stores, because at that point they are left with surplus inventory and no way to make money off of it. Space is at a premium, especially with the big chains with their high merchandise turnover, and even marking stuff down when it is about to reach its pull date requires staff to keep track of all of this and do the work involved, along with taking up space that could be used for a higher turnover, higher profit item.
Some stores will go the "good will" route and try to do something useful with the dead merch inventory, but it still is a management problem, and perishables especially are problematic.
This is a lot of why so many still just throw the overstock and less than cosmetically perfect items in the trash. Those who cannot afford to shop at grocery stores will learn quickly that it is a myth that everything in a trash bin is inedible or toxic. This in turn drives locking of trash bins. Store managers frequently will say this is for insurance purposes; this seems unlikely, since people who cannot afford to shop at grocery stores are unlikely to be able to afford attorneys for such litigation.
At the same time, store managers will at times pay their staff to do such as pour bleach upon the garbage, which argues even further against the "insurance" canard.
No, it's more along the lines of shoppers and staff being afraid of the trashpickers. As with homeless people, they are perceived as having crossed the line into "other," though many trashpickers are not homeless.
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