Winco Infrequently, but consistently sells some below par produce Eugene, Oregon

Over a period of 4 or 5 years of shopping at Winco I have noticed they sell peaches every summer that often do not meet the standards for edible food. The peaches look wonderful when your at the store, but on several occasions, once they ripened they were rotted, and mushy inside or just mushy without juiciness. I believe they are buying inferior product at a lower cost because farmers know the quality of the crop even before its ripe, that is how they decide to price it at a given level. Why I or anyone else keeps buying peaches or nectarine is a mystery, except perhaps we keep hoping they will turn out to be as good as they look.

I have had the same experience with dark cherries priced at $4.50 a lb which after getting home found that quite a large number had brown rotted sections in them that were not easy to spot inside the bag at the store. I bought 2.5 lbs at a cost of at $11 only to not be able to eat most of them. A couple days later. the usually much higher priced Fred Myers had them 50 cents a lb less and were very good quality. This is not the first time i have also had problems with Winco cherries. Other probelms have been pears that do not ripen but rot with big brown sections, rotted celery, rotted garlic cloves, rotted plums, rotted onions.

Now on to the meat dept, I have bought pork loin on a few different occasions that looked great in the package but once I got it home, it was brown underneath where it was not visible. It smelled like it was spoiling. This has also been the case with cuts of beef like round steak and london broil. The taste is off after its cooked too.

Now on to dairy, the packaged mozzarella molded only after a few days on at least 3 occasions.

Another complaint was that on a week day evening, 7 PM the meat manager decided to pull all the meat off the shelves to do the monthly or weekly (not sure which) sanitary cleaning. It was a big inconvenience and I have never seen them do this during the height of the shopping time for many people at any other food store. This is something that would be done very early in the morning or later at night for most stores. When I expressed the inconvenience since i could not shop for what I wanted,  the manager seemed to care less and couldn't relate to the fact that other stores don't do this to their customers. After my bad experiences with poor quality meats, and this incidence, I mostly get my deals at Costco which has far higher quality at the same price or lower. This is increasingly the case for fruit and veggie produce as well.

I'm beginning to limited my purchases to mostly non-perishable purchases, ie, canned, or frozen brand name products.

Lastly, the workers in the produce area act like they dont want shoppers be "getting in their way" when they are unloading produce. Sure i understand that they have a hard job and have a lot to do but surely they can be accommodating at the same time for people to have access to what they are selling by being courteous enough to "share" the area with others. After all that is how their salary is being paid, by the shoppers. What are we supposed to go to another area and keep checking back when they 'allow" access? Nice way to shop huh.

If you feel like your not going to be able to get the selection you came for, over time you will not go back, because you dont want a more stressful, rude shopping experience. I was not being rude or shoving my way in get to the food, but they didn't show any courtesy or make me feel like I could "get in" to get any of it.

The management is awful in not training the workers at Winco to be polite and courteous as I've seen especially at Safeway or even Walmart for that matter. WalMart workers are paid notoriously low wages, and I'm sure even lower than Winco wages since the latter is "employee owned", but the WalMart people have been the nicest, kindest and most helpful in comparison.

Winco get your act together, you have a lot of potential for being a great store, and stop ripping off the customer with poor quality foods that appears otherwise!