When it comes to buying products at the supermarket, many people make large purchases for the whole week or even two or more weeks, so it is common to look for offers to get the cheapest purchase possible. However, it is useless to buy cheap if, afterwards, you have to throw away the products because they expire before being consumed and spoil.
To avoid this, you can follow a method known as the FIFO system, to make a purchase as efficient as possible, getting those supermarket products that have a longer expiration date, so they take longer to spoil and can be consumed later in time.
In fact, in a viral video on the social network TikTok, a user has raised doubts about this formula, as in just six seconds, you can see the young woman taking a package of sliced bread from the back of the shelf, at the same time that you can read: “Only those who know the FIFO system know why we do this,” she writes in the post.
This is how the FIFO method works
But, what does the FIFO method consist of? If we only look at the acronym, it corresponds to the words ‘First In, First Out’. This means that the first products that enter the supermarket, are the first ones that should be sold, logical if you consider that, the longer they stay at the point of sale, the less time they will last at home before their expiration date arrives.
In this way, supermarket restockers try to put the products with the longest expiration date in the back of the shelf, the last ones to arrive at the warehouse, while they place in the first rows of the shelf those foods with a shorter expiration date, in order to sell them first.
This is because customers, as a general rule, first pick up the products in the front row of the shelf. However, even though we now know the FIFO method, it is always necessary to look at the expiration date, as some supermarkets have already begun to notice the trend of consumers picking up the foods that are further back on the shelf.
In fact, in the mentioned video of the user on TikTok, some workers have commented, precisely, that they use the opposite technique: “I work in a supermarket and I place the oldest items at the back and they take them unsuspectingly,” writes one of the users in the post.
