I find it very annoying when parents give their kids food to eat in the store.I have seen banana peels in a cart, how do they pay for that ? I have also seen moms giving their kids donuts or other pastries, do they tell the checker of the food that was eaten ? I always wonder about that. to me food that is eaten before being paid for is stealing.

I'm sure everyone around me at the grocery store was wondering what I was up to the last time I was there......all I bought was 2 packages of melting chocolate and 3 containers of sea salt! Odd combo, but that's all I needed

It gets hard NOT to notice when you're at the conveyor belt by the register. You have to look at something, and the natural thing is the food unloaded in front of or behind you...

I understand a mix of things, some treats and some proper food. I can even understand a stack of boxed microwave dinners (that would have been me in the past ).

But I have to grimace inside when I see a pile of Cheetos, Hostess Cupcakes, frozen pizza, soda pop and hot dog buns. Egads! How can people do that to themselves...

First of all, I myself have been known to eat a cold hot dog right out of the package, and I'm not ashamed of it. They are precooked, for heavens sake. It's better than giving a child some sugary thing.

Second of all, I have been known to eat food in the store. I just take the wrapper or package with me and have them ring it up at the checkout. If it's fruit, I could weigh it on the scale in the produce dept. and keep the little label that identifies it for the checkout. It's only stealing if you don't pay for it.

Jay

Maybe I'm really dumb, but I had no idea hot dogs were precooked! That makes me feel better about the lady giving her kid the hot dog in-store.

This. Where I live, you weigh stuff on the scale and it prints out a sticker for you to put on the bag yourself. Then the cashier just cans the sticker, assuming that if she's scanning an empty bag, that you already ate whatever it was.

Quite easily, if that's what I'm in the mood for. We don't have Hostess Cupcakes here, but I like them and will substitute whatever other cupcakes I like. The soda pop would be diet pop for me, and the hot dog buns... well, I'm not huge on the buns, but I like hot dogs. I prefer fresh pizza but frozen can be tasty, and Cheetos are pretty tasty, too.

For me, junk food definitely has its place, and as long as I stay active and also eat healthy foods, I'm not giving it up for anyone. More power to anyone that eats clean 24/7 and has no place in their life for junk food, but allowing room for it in my life works for me.

Although I don't think I'd ever eat food prior to paying for it at a store, I think if I was a parent of a child, child was hungry, I might find something and give it to them and buy it. I've seen quite a few parents buy opened boxes of things at the store.

Nutritionally, I also think the hot dog is at least as good a choice as pretzels. If it were an all-meat dog, I'd say it's actually a better choice. They're both high in salt, and the pretzels aren't usually whole-grain.

There's also almost no difference between packaged hot dogs and bologna. You don't want to live on deli meats, because they're way too salty, but as a safe and convenient food, they're fine.

In fact, for something fun for summer picnics, I've picked up bologna from the deli (asking for 1/2" slices). Then I buy only hamburger buns for both the burgers and the grilled bologna. It tastes exactly like a hot dog, but fits on a hamburger bun.

I don't look at what other people have in their grocery carts. I don't really care what people are buying. The only time I find myself curious is if they're buying a lot of something and I'm wondering if I'm missing some great sale!

But I have wondered if people are judging my cart and I guess that some people do...oh well! I guess people also wonder why I order Diet Coke at restaurants when I'm ordering some really fattening meal (on my weekly splurge) to go along with it. Regular Coke is just too sweet to me.

Yeah, upon further reflection, a cold hot dog out of the package isn't an abysmal choice. It's just instinctual to think, "Oh--hot dogs aren't wholesome" because it's been so drilled into my head that fat, sodium, and nitrates are "bad food." I should be more aware of that whole bad food/good food thing since I know it's a false dichotomy and that food choices are contextual.

I also freely admit that I don't have kids and was the baby of the family, so for all I know children live on Play-Doh, juice boxes, and sand. It'd be easy to say, "geez, you should feed your kid before you take him into the store," but then we go back to the whole judging thing that I shouldn't do.

Funny how I wouldn't dream of judging a person's cart contents, but would be ready to raise an eyebrow at a harried parent feeding her kid cold hot dogs in the store. It's a good lesson; I could always stand to be kinder and more compassionate.

I never even considered that people look at each others' carts at all, let along judge them (dunno why - seems like a normal enough thing to do), until a couple things happened.

1) A cashier commented on my healthy items and talked about how she wanted to get healtier.

2) I had a spaghetti squash in my cart and I heard two people that I passed by go, "That's what we should have for dinner! Spaghetti squash!"

In general, I try very hard not to judge people I don't know. Most times when I do judge, I am dead wrong, especially with appearances. I sometimes glance at the contents of others' carts now, but usually it's unconscious and I barely realize I'm doing it until the contents give me ideas for dinner.

There is no way I can definitely ascertain anything about the person's life from the contents of their grocery cart - No Way. Other than, of course, that they are considering purchasing those items. Lol!

I honestly don't care what others think of my cart. It's my food, and I'm buying it, so unless they want to chip in, they don't get a say. But it is usually healthy foods, and that makes me happy because I know I'm eating better. Whatever others think is up to them.

Interesting topic, though - I never even heard of judging others by their carts until I came to this site. I wonder if it's really prevalent? Now I'll go around watching for people watching me watching them. Haha!

Uh, weird. I'd probably mention to him that it's for my family, which likes pizza, and while I'm not taking unsolicited diet advice at the moment, I would accept donations toward my grocery bill.

I sometimes make positive judgments on peoples carts ('wow, look at all those veggies, I don't even know how to cook half of them yet). But I don't really make negative judgments.

Part of that is because I know that my carts are often the type that would get judged very harshly, since I do the shopping for both my sister and myself. I get a big chunk of my food from trader joes, so most of the things I buy at the regular grocery are for her. That generally means lots of diet soda (which I drink as well), cookies, Little Debbies, frozen pizza and other prepared 'junk food'. Its not unusual for me to go in the middle of the week and buy just soda and sweets for her since she always needs some quick carbs in the house for medical reasons. But, I know that at my current weight, I don't get the benefit of the doubt from most people that notice my cart, even though I'm not going to eat any of it.

The second reason is because, when I was buying tons of junk for myself, and would go home and eat a whole carton of ice cream in one night just like some people probably assumed I would do, I was clinically depressed. Just like I wouldn't want strangers to make value judgments on me while I was struggling, I do my best not to do the same to others. I have no idea why someone is buying something, and its not my business, not to mention pretty presumptuous of me to assume I did.

Oddly enough, now that I think about it, other then the passing thought that I was adding to the statistic about people who buy diet soda and ice cream together, I didn't really think much about it while I was gaining most of the weight, but now it occurs to me more often. I guess that feeling might come from the same place that makes me have mixed feelings about how I look right now. I mean, the vast majority of the time, I'm proud of what I've done, and can see the positive changes in myself, but every now and then it occurs to me that a stranger or new acquaintance can't see that, all they can see is the the work-in-progress me at one moment in time. Its the same with the carts. All a cart is is what someone is buying, for whatever reason, at one single moment of in their lives, and nothing more.

Primetime's What Would You Do, did a story similar to this. They set up an overweight woman with her daughter in a grocery, buying all sorts of unhealthy things..and then someone else would come by and tell them how wrong they were for buying & feeding all that junk to their child. Other people jumped in defending the mother & her child, but of course, a lot of people stayed out of it.

Personally, I don't look at what other people are buying at the grocery store, because I really don't care. It's their business, and their life. I often find it annoying when people make comments on how good something in my cart looks. I usually just smile or nod at them and go on about my merry way. If people look in my cart, then fine whatever..to each their own. I really don't care what strangers think of me.

Agree, wholeheartedly. I remember judging what was in other people's carts, but now that I'm thin and healthy, I seem to be pay less attention.

I also got surprised by people's tendency to do this recently whent a stranger at check-out line commented on how much squash I was buying (I really like squash). It was like, geez, you would think I was being berated for buying 3 tubs of lard. It's squash! It's yummy! And healthy!

I do judge. Not all the time but if I'm standing in a long enough queue, the yes, I do notice and judge. I think it's only human nature when you've become food conscious yourself, to notice what others are doing.

My response (which doesn't show by a word, a look, a flicker of an eyelid) is usually sadness really - honestly, so many people just do not know that the junk in their trolley is so bad for their health.
Mixed in with anger, anger that they don't know, haven't been taught how to eat both healthily and economically;
anger that for generations, their family hasn't (may not have) known about good nutrition, and that the government doesn't seem to do anything to stop this pattern perpetuating;
anger that sometimes I think that governments don't Want poor people (because where I live it is mostly less affluent people who have dire diets) to learn how to eat better, because it would improve their mental and emotional health so much that they'd be less sheep-like and controllable.

O/T other supermarket hates:
*children on wheeled boots/'cute' little car shaped things that zoom up and down the aisles: it's a shop, not a playground
*children being given store food to eat without paying for it:feed your child before you go out or teach the child to wait
*people who pack their shopping as it comes off the belt; then pack the inevitable backlog if it's been a fast cashier; only then start looking for their wallet: it's not a surprise that you have to pay at a checkout but some people behave as thought it is
*(my current biggest bugbear) assistants who monitor the self-checkouts, who come and explain kindly to me how to scan things when the machine has thrown a wobbly; I am Extremely technologically able, thankyou, it's your machine that doesn't recognize this item/coin/note. Seriously, I'll know when I've reached goal weight when officious assistants don't come and treat me kindly at the self checkouts. Apparently I look middle-aged and confused at the moment. When I'm thin enough I'll look middle-aged but savvy!

All I have to say is that I miss shopping carts and being able to drive the groceries home in my car trunk. I do almost all my grocery shopping on foot at small local markets run by little old ladies, and it's rare that I buy anything there other than vegetables, fruit and tofu. It's also rare that I see anyone else shopping.

In America I have been guilty of seeing people buying gigantic bags of Twinkies and thinking "aaaand that's why you're fat," but I think everyone has done that. I generally don't care and am not too curious though. I'm quite familiar with the "here, buy us 20 candy bars and a block of lard" requests from parties and give people the benefit of the doubt.