«The buyer must see the leftovers in the store»
At a time when retail products are becoming more expensive by leaps and bounds, before the Russians — especially the poor and those who live from paycheck to paycheck — an invisible question arises: how to get daily bread? The answer was proposed by a group of deputies of the State Duma. Those products that have an expiration date and are now being taken to landfills should be distributed free of charge to the population, in particular, to low-income Russians. Such a bill has already been prepared in the bowels of the State Duma. Can it be put into practice? After all, this idea has been hovering in our society for several years, but things are still there…
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Products with an expiration date should not be thrown into landfills, but distributed free of charge to the population — such an initiative, supported by a ready-made bill, was made by Yaroslav Nilov, head of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs.
As shown In practice, about 20% of such products are accumulated in our country annually — that is, a fifth of the total production goes straight to garbage cans: these are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tons of food. Surely the products that today are taken out of sight and disposed of can greatly support the population, especially the poor.
In addition, such an order can solve another urgent problem — their processing. Even according to official data, it is not going smoothly in the country, there is no money to buy the necessary equipment, this equipment itself is mainly from “unfriendly countries”, and in general, organizing the process itself is not cheap.
Therefore, the authors of the bill hope to kill two birds with one stone: to support the population with a «piece of bread» and to remove the problem of processing food waste. The exception to these rules of the rule should be only children's food, diet and alcohol. However, products with an expired shelf life, lawmakers add, must be disposed of without fail.
But there is a clear logical inconsistency here: if we start providing people with products with an expiring shelf life, then they will simply not be with the expired one!
However, such a tempting and seemingly socially oriented bill also has well-reasoned opponents.
— I support the position of the deputies, but with one amendment, — says the coordinator of the civil project «For Honest Products» Alexander Brazhko, — Send products with an expiring shelf life to the power structures — executive and legislative — to their catering plants.
— I'm afraid that such products will first of all end up in social institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes, schools and kindergartens. Our low-income citizens will also get hooked on them. And what does an ordinary Russian have to do with the fact that millions of tons of food are annually buried in landfills or, at best, processed into animal feed? Nothing!
I assure you: if products of “not the first freshness” go to canteens where officials eat, then very quickly we will learn how to properly organize trade and store products, there will be money for the purchase of modern refrigerators and the construction of storage facilities . In addition, the budget for catering for officials and deputies will be significantly reduced.
In my opinion, this is an immoral story — to replace monetary compensations to the population with the issuance of sets of products with an expiring or, God forbid, with an expired shelf life — this situation cannot be ruled out either.
— For example, for long-term storage products, introduce a rule: 10 days before the expiration of this period, a discount is assigned — 70%, 5 days — 90%, and in the last three days — set the price at 1 ruble per commodity unit.
— Now there is no legal requirement for trade to disclose product balances, and they must be publicly available on the store's website. As in online stores, we can clearly see it all. In addition, with modern technical capabilities, it is possible to quickly reconfigure cash registers for a system of discounts, depending on the expiration date. For example, you buy a carton of milk for 100 rubles, and they give you 70 rubles change at the checkout — the expiration date has begun.
— their warehouses to the limit — there the products «turn sour», lie before the expiration date and after it.