You can score some real bargains if you look for clearance stickers on soon-to-expire food at your local grocery store. Now, one store is offering the biggest bargains of all – clearance food you can have for free.
If you want to take advantage of these deals, you’ll have to be ready to do some late-night shopping – and get yourself a plane ticket to Britain.
As part of its effort to combat food waste, the British grocery chain Tesco is pulling out all the stops to make sure it doesn’t have to throw away any unsold items. After 9:30pm, the already reduced price of many clearanced food items will be reduced to zero.
The retailer is currently testing the program at a limited number of its stores. Many items will be donated, some will be offered to staff, and the rest will be tagged with new yellow clearance stickers featuring a price of nothing at all.
“We are constantly looking for innovative new ways to reduce food waste,” a Tesco spokesperson said. The trial program “will allow customers to take any remaining yellow stickered items for free at the end of the day, after they have first been offered to charities and colleagues.”
The move is the latest in Tesco’s effort to make sure clearance-priced food doesn’t go to waste. A couple of years ago it created a dedicated clearance section in hundreds of stores, so shoppers didn’t have to go treasure-hunting through the store looking for discounted items. Tesco said the new clearance sections would feature “bold new signage” reading “Reduced in price. Just as nice,” as pictured above, and would offer “a wide range of products from fresh produce such as salads, meat, bread and sweet treats which are close to their expiry date.”
Tesco quoted one store manager as saying “the new signage has had an immediate effect and we are seeing more people wishing to buy from our reductions area, particularly on fresh food, meaning there are far fewer items left at the end of an evening.”
“Yellow stickers” are common in British grocery stores, and they’ve helped create a cottage industry of bargain hunters online, who share their latest yellow-sticker finds. Some worry that reducing prices to free will turn a fun pastime into a frenzy. “The amount of elderly ladies hovering around that aisle is about to explode,” one Reddit commenter wrote. “The fights over yellow stickers are bad enough sometimes, imagine what it’s gonna be like now?” another wondered.
About eight years ago, Tesco set a goal of cutting food waste by 50% by the end of this year. Its latest figures show waste has been cut by just 18% so far. So there’s still a lot of progress to be made.
Free food just might do it. And if it helps Tesco achieve its goal of reducing waste, while helping cash-strapped shoppers get even bigger bargains – then everybody could win.
Image source: Tesco
