Comeuppance for U.K. supermarkets

This feature from BBC news is an undercover piece By Audrey Brown on U.K. supermarket food safety issues. Whistleblower: Supermarkets was broadcast on BBC May 22 and is available for viewing for seven days from the same Web site.
Here are a few excerpts:

Last year I was contacted by several supermarket employees working up and down the country. They told me they had serious concerns about the food they were being asked to sell. One whistleblower in particular, from Didcot, was worried about the things she had seen.
So I applied for positions at a Sainsbury's in Didcot, Oxford, and later Tesco in Woodford Green, North London. I used fake references, which none of the stores checked before I started work.
After working undercover at both stores for a total of four months, I discovered that customers were often deceived about the freshness and quality of the food they were buying.
At times, even customers' health may have been put at risk.
I saw first-hand that cheap food can come at price. What I discovered during my six month investigation into Britain's supermarkets for BBC One's latest Whistleblower documentary will change the way I shop forever.

TK: Brown talks at length about use-by and sell-by dates, and says those dates are easily changed by staff "who would wipe out existing dates and write in other, later dates."

A lot of the time, the counter staff treated the meat and fish we were selling with indifference and, worryingly, there were times at Tesco when they had no idea what the real sell-by date was as they had altered it so many times.
Sometimes it was not until the food smelled bad that it was eventually thrown away.
The counter manager at Sainsbury's regularly asked me to extend the dates on deli items because they smelt "OK".

Managers seemed under pressure to extend the shelf-life of food in order to keep their weekly "wastage budgets" to a minimum and thereby help keep store profits high. They would come out of the weekly "team huddle" - which I saw at both the Sainsbury's and Tesco stores - buzzing and hungry to hit targets. Even as a counter assistant, the pressure other staff seemed to feel was almost tangible.

Supermarket staff are required by law to carry out temperature checks on the fridges storing food. These records are incredibly important because they can be called upon as evidence if, for example, a customer takes a supermarket to court claiming they got food poisoning from something purchased at the store. Yet I regularly saw fridge temperatures being faked by staff. One even showed me how to do it and whose signature was easiest to fake. She told me the figures to put in, adding "put in a high one sometimes" - presumably to make it look more authentic.

From the pristine supermarket uniforms that lull us into a false belief that hygienic practices are being implemented, it is very different behind the scenes. Following my initial induction, which consisted of nothing more than a general health and safety chat, I managed to muddle my way through until I was eventually given something called Bronze Training. Now, Tesco are proud of their training, but when I was tested I was simply handed the answers I needed and told to input them on a separate sheet.

TK: The reporter worked four months in supermarkets settings, and I would venture to say she conveys a fairly accurate picture of everyday reality. There is pressure to minimize waste and pressure to meet sales goals, and these pressures are considered every time employees in the supermarket make a decision. Supermarkets both in the the U.K. and the U.S. better settle on what their policies are for sell-by dating and then make sure those policies are carried out precisely. The report also points to a paucity of adequate training on food safety. The smell test is not good enough for the 21st century.

Toshiba RIP?

My company laptop has scars from my heavy, unreasonable and incessant use. Hauling through airports, to Capitol Hill, to Chile, to convention duty, to shipping point sections and the occasional high school English essay.

The decals have long since surrendered. The mouse touch pad has a shiny spot in the middle where all the textured coating has worn off. About six months ago, the front cover of laptop had a fault line develop. The hairline stress fracture soon turned into a crack and then a clean break. Now, about one fourth of the bottom front panel of my keyboard is missing.

Lately, the operating system has begun to quit on me, taunting me with the blue screen of death. Somehow, I have been able to successfully reboot ("Windows has recovered from a serious error") and continue its torturous regime. This weekend, though, the machine failed to successfully reboot. In fact, even the power light LED that shows the unit is plugged in has turned off.

Wally and Steven in IT have a tall task ahead; resurrect the Toshiba for further produce journalism exploits. I am afraid the Toshiba may want no part of it.