https://www.facebook.com/derk.brown.5/videos/937579939737119/
Two St. Louis women were reportedly locked inside a neighborhood grocer after confronting the store’s manager about several expired food items they found on the shelves.
In a video posted to Facebook last week, the two women are heard complaining to a clerk about year-old cookies and breakfast cereal found at the local market and demanding that the items be removed from the shelves so that no one buys them.
“Everything is two years old,” one of the women says. “Everything I picked up was outdated!”
The clerk grows agitated and tries to appease the two ladies before threatening to lock them inside the store if they refuse to stop recording. Another man who appeared to work at the store also threatened to call the police.
A group of local activists has since allegedly shut down the Arab-owned King’s Market after customers discovered it was selling goods that were several years past its expiration date.
According to a separate video uploaded to Facebook on Sunday, the activists organized a boycott of the local market after customers realized they purchased severely expired food items.
“This isn’t the only store that’s doing this,” said a woman in the now-deleted video. “It’s just not one Arab store, it’s all throughout the city. And we’re gonna randomly do pop-ups. They need to expect us [to start] checking all the shelves, and if there’s outdated food on these shelves, we’re going to throw the stuff away.”
Their goal wasn’t to shut down the stores, she explained, but to ensure residents are provided with quality, unexpired food items for purchase.
Shutting down all the stores would be especially detrimental to such a community, as it’s located in the middle of a food desert, or an area with limited access to fresh fruit, veggies and other nutritious items due to a lack of grocery stores or farmer’s markets. Many families in the community are also low-income.
An unidentified woman in the video said she and a few others visited the neighborhood store to pick up a pack of cookies and realized they were expired from 2016. What’s worse, she alleged there were also Twix candy bars that were expired from Christmas 2017. She looked at the backs of several cereal bags to find the same: goods way past their expiration dates.
“Every canned good next to them you could see the dirt and rust built up on the can,” she said. “There were pickle jars with gunk on them. It was disgusting.
