Monday, January 10, 2011

Monday Madness

WHEN DOES THIS EXPIRE?

Please, just tell me the date!!!

Make sure you bring your calculator when you go food shopping. One thing maddening about grocery shopping in India is figuring out the date something expires. Yes, that's right, you do have to figure it out.

First of all, the way dates are written here are different than in the U.S. For example, if you want to write January 10, 2011 you would put either 10 January, 2011 OR 10/1/2011. So already I have to do a little thinking when I look at dates to make sure I don't read the above example as October 1st, 2011.

Secondly, most of the products put the "Manufactured Date" only and then somewhere else on the product they will put in very tiny print "best used before 120 days after manufactured date".

And sometimes they don't put dd/mm/yyyy, they just put dd/mm or mm/yy. Arrgghh!

So this is what I ran across the other day: Manufactured date said 11/10 and after 5 minutes of searching the product, I found "best used within 3 months of manufactured date".

Does this mean it was manufactured on October 11th and in this case the product would be expired, or does it mean it was manufactured on November 2010 and I still have a month to use it?

So, I asked the store clerk, just to be sure, and of course, he didn't know.

I was feeling risky so I bought it anyway. If you don't hear from me next week, you'll know why..........






1 comment:

  1. It's either dd/mm/yy or mm/yy(mostly), never it's dd/mm in India. And yaa, very few over here care about those things before buying a product.

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