I’ve been calling around various grocery stores this week, trying to get a hold of pork fat trimmings so that I can make my own lard for some recipes. One of the stores I called today said that they couldn’t give me the trimmings because they don’t have a code for it. I forget exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of, “so you’re just going to throw it away instead?” “Yes.”
I understand that it does require some effort to separate from the rest of the waste, so I don’t mind paying a bit, but its upsetting that they have no way to pass scraps along to someone who will use them instead of just tossing them in the waste.
Edit for anyone invested: I called around to a few other stores after making this post. One or two mentioned that they don’t necessarily throw all of those bits away, but often use them for other products, such as sausages. I also found a store that will be putting aside their trimmings for me tomorrow, and they should have more than I need. It’s almost an hour away on the bus, but right next to another store that should have any other hard to find ingredients that I’ll need for the tamales.
Also interesting was that different locations of the same chains had different answers for me regarding even their ability to provide the scraps to me, so the suggestions that a manager might be able to make it happen are probably very accurate.
Unfortunately most local managers don’t actually have the ability to negotiate. Their job is to administer the machine, and avoid getting sued.
It sucks because it often means they can’t make decisions even if they would make the store more money.
I worked at a big box store for a while and my department was turning away customers simply because we couldn’t serve them. Hiring more help would have brought in revenue far beyond their wages, but my stores hands were tied by centralized corporate policy that dictated how many people they could hire.
I had like $500k in the sales pipeline. I had an excellent conversion rate on the customers I actually had time to work with. But I was forced to spend my time stocking shelves and cleaning while my customers called in frustrated why I wasn’t helping them.
People say it’s all about profit but that’s not actually true. It’s about maximizing the ability of the central corporate office to model and predict the money flows. I wish it were all about profit.
I’ve worked for startups and other small locally-owned businesses and it’s so great to see the flexibility they have. Working for a huge corporation sucked because it was like twelve layers of command structure to get to someone who could make a decision.
If you want trimmings from a big chain talk to the butcher that does the cutting. You’ll likely get better results.