I am, but still it sounds bad to me to expose them to the road elements on the way home.
And food in packaging, it is usually in boxes or other containers most of the time in supply line transit. Individual items only get unpacked in the store, so I would think this practice adds considerably to their “dirtyness”.
Not really. Bread, milk, soft drinks, and bagged snacks like potato chips all get delivered and stocked by the individual vendors, but everything else goes through a single warehouse ran by the grocery franchiser. Dairy comes in extra boxes, but most of the stuff is stacked 3D-tetris-style 6 feet high on a pallet and then wrapped in cellophane on the pallet before getting loaded on the truck. It's used just as a convenient way to bind the stack together so it doesn't dump in traffic. When it gets to the store, the pallets sit in the back until they are needed and then the cellophane is cut off and the items go directly on the shelves. Packing them up further would slow things down too much and confuse the stock workers too much (it's mostly teenagers and mentally challenged people, not exactly a life long career). It was not uncommon to find rat and mouse feces and urine on top of cans and boxes.
Almost all of the produce is in nearly the exact form at the warehouse as you would find them in the store. For example, watermelons are in an open-topped, cardboard bin that just gets moved from the warehouse to the grocery floor in exactly its final state. Berries are all in their plastic clamshell boxes, no extra packing, no tape. They rack them up in flat cardboard boxes with no top, just tall enough that a single layer of berry boxes can fit in it and the next layer stacks on top.
This one time, one of the pickers had a pallet full of berry racks, six feet tall. He took a corner with his pallet jack too fast and dumped the entire load on the floor. Berries scattered everywhere. They used a snow shovel to scoop them back up and back into the boxes and back into the racks. Then out to the truck and out to the store, where they would have gotten relabeled "mixed berries."
