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This is just one cart of about 10 carts I saw lined up at Walmart a couple weeks ago when I visited early in the morning. They were lined up by customer service, waiting for employees to put away. The perishable items (the ham, frozen pizzas etc) were being thrown out.

Now I know where to go next time my pantry gets low, which is most of the time.

What a wasteful society we have become.

Let's see- why are these items being thrown out?

On the consumer end, we go shopping for food for an hour or more, wait in line to pay for what we picked out and when they give us the magic number we find we don't have enough money. So we put things to the side, probably thinking someone will put them away for us. Or we change our minds in mid-shop and instead of walking a football-field's length back to put it away we say to ourselves "oh they'll put it away- I'm giving them job security".

On the store's end, this is a bare-bones-no-customer-service kinda store (as far as baggers go- remember them?) and this waste is just a cost of doing business. Why should they hire another employee at $7.25 an hour to put away (if salvageable) a $10 ham? They can just write it off to waste.

Yes, there's always going to be the r-e-a-l-l-y lazy shoppers who decide not to buy an item and just stick it anywhere on the shelves no matter if it's perishable or not (there's always a 'bad apple' among us). Whatever the reason- it's a waste and it's a shame.

I wanted to call up this Walmart and ask them just how much they throw out in a day. I also wanted to ask them how much they donate to the local food bank. But I knew that I'd probably still be waiting for that answer to go through corporate and back and blah blah blah. I'm still waiting for the accessible pathway promised last year.

And I'm still waiting for the carts to be cleared from the bus stop.

Told ya- I'm available to gather carts, and I can even check food for proper temperature and try to salvage it by placing it back on the shelf to be sold.

But now I'm multi-tasking, so you need to pay me $14 an hour.

And give me a cool title with a tricked-out name tag (like Flo's). It can say "Hello, my name is Suzanne and I give a sh*t".