The Fruit Grocery Store Employees Hate When Customers Sample In-Store (It's Not Grapes)

Sampling produce at the grocery store isn't the sneaky snack you think it is. The employees not only know that you're sampling the produce, they also dread cherry season because of it. When asked on a Reddit post what they wish customers would stop doing and spitting out cherry pits was a top contender. "Leaving cherry pits and other garbage (used Kleenexes is another favorite) all over the place. Most stores have trash cans that are accessible to customers. Use them." There are some great money-saving tricks to use while grocery shopping, but scattering your gross cherry pits wherever you please isn't one of them.

Cherry season typically runs from mid-May through August, and while grocery stores might have plenty in stock, some customers just want a small taste and not a whole bag. In a different Reddit post, a store employee recalled the cherry pit-pocalaypse with horror. "I work in a produce department, and whenever we have cherries in stock the amount of pits I find everywhere is disturbing. There was this one older lady who spat her cherry pit back into the bag and not even two minutes later another woman did the same thing out of the same bag." Finding slobbered-on cherry pits in abundance as a store employee is awful enough, but finding those pits in your newly-purchased bag of cherries is also disgusting. So, what do you do as someone who wants to purchase cherries sans slobbery pits?

As it turns out, not checking your bag for spit-out pits is one mistake everyone makes when buying cherries. If you find discarded pits in your produce bag, rest assured that most (if not all) grocery stores will let you return the produce or exchange it for a different, hopefully more sanitary, bag. If it's not worth the trip back to the store for you or if you purchased unbagged cherries, be sure to wash the cherries thoroughly with running water to remove any dirt or potential remnants of someone's spit which may have been tossed back in with the pit.

For the cherry samplers who commit these heinous acts, it's better to toss your pit in the trash. If there's none around, hang on to it until you find one. Not only is this the courteous thing to do, it also reduces the spread of bacteria that will undoubtedly spread to other food items in the store; especially if you're spitting the pit back into a bag you don't intend on buying. You can ask store employees to sample the cherries instead of grabbing them from the bag and hiding your shame. This allows the employees to give the cherry a quick clean so you aren't ingesting any bacteria, dirt, and debris which may have piled on the fruit somewhere between harvest and the produce aisle. As far as employees are concerned, spitting your cherry pits wherever you please in the grocery store is not the best way to make the most of stone fruit season.