Back in the late 1980s, not so long ago, i worked at a Safeway fish counter in Silicon Valley. And i couldn't eat fish without wanting to retch for years.
One of the first strange rules of Safeway was and may still be is that all the fish arrives at stores frozen and yet we employees were forbidden to say that the fish was "frozen". There was a big, huge stainless steel sink with hot water that we would thaw the fish frozen blocks in every morning, to add to all the fish that we could not throw away from the refrigerator and the rusty stainless steel rack and dirty plastic rack cover. So when a customer asked, and we had Playboy bunnies and computer geeks and executives at the counter, "Is this fish fresh?" , meaning has it never been frozen and was it caught and shipped recently, Safeway told us to always answer "Yes, this fish is fresh." A huge lie, but American employees do such things normally in almost every job and field , every day.
Safeway boss told us that they had done a study that if we put out more and bigger stacks of fish, customers would buy more, so we did. But it was so disgusting how we were told to do it. When we thawed frozen new "fresh" fish, we were told to put in on the bottom of the stack of that kind of fish, under all the days and weeks old slimy smelly fish that we might rinse daily,or not.
Gross ? It gets worse. Out in the display trough on ice chips we had a huge 'brown' trout that went out there week after ,,,week,,,and eventually turned to brown flesh mush that we could not even handle. Have a vomit big trashcan nearby, cuz the floor was so disgustingly dirty greasy, and under the fish counter were all these prawns and shrimp what were growing mold afros cuz we were only allowed about 15 minutes to set up and 15 minutes to tear down, so no time to pick up and soap and scrub the floor.In fact we were not allowed to clean the floor even on our own time as it was against Safeway policy.
So, where were and are the public health departments to stop this ? Where were and are our elected representatives to protect us from such common private enterprise fraud and deception and public health risk? Business as usual.
