Jose writes,
I thought that the long lines and the produce always being out of stock was bad enough, but then I noticed the small family of birds living at my local Safeway (Nutley St, Fairfax, VA). I wrote a letter to Safeway’s corporate offices about a week ago to complain about the poor state of the store, but I guess that management really doesn’t care enough to act quickly. My question is, if there’s no birdbath inside Safeway, then where do the birds bathe?
We can’t imagine a more perfect bird sanctuary than a supermarket: plenty to eat in produce, “rainfall” every day, and no predators. At least not at this Safeway.
(Photos: josecmelia)
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I enjoy seeing birds in the supermarket. They’re cute and I wash my produce
The birds are natural and fresh (organic too?), unlike most things in the grocery store.
Ever hear of canaries in a coal mine? As long as the birds in the grocery store are okay, it should be safe to shop there
wait until you see the bald eagles flying around…
Long lines… out of stock produce… hey that’s my old Safeway store!
To all of you suggesting a stern call to the local sanitarian.. WHY? Seriously folks. If I find rat shit or dead roaches in my food, sure I’ll call, but a few birds in a big box store? Besides their cute. (yea, thats the best argument i got) really though, wash your damn veggies and don’t buy the box of Rice-a-Roni with bird shit on it.
@forgottenpassword: The bird that beat me down the juice aisle was just sitting on the shelf when I picked up my juice. So I guess they do just hang out.
@snazz: Not to worry…the poison that they generally use to get rid of flying pests comes in the form of lead from a pellet gun.
Wegmans tends to keep their stores super clean, and while they may have birds in the store, I doubt that they have birds nesting amongst the produce week after week. I can visit a Wegmans that was built in the 1970s and it looks brand new when compared to the Safeway that was build last year.
The difficult thing in a Wegmans is that most of their stores are open 24 hours a day/7 days a week so not only do you have to hunt down your prey, you also need to make sure that customers are 1) aware that store management is the “crazed psycho” walking around a grocery store with a gun, and 2) that your customers are not in the area of where you will be shooting from or where the bird will land.
How many gift cards are standard for getting shot in the @$$ with a pellet gun or having a dead bird land on your head?
Yes, they’re there to poop on the grapes people steal.
But where do they poo????
I see these little guys in WalMart all the time, but then again there’s no food in our Wally’s, so I wasn’t all that concerned. That, and they always stuck to the pet section where all the birdseed is
@Rachacha: But why? Most people like the birds, don’t notice, or ignore them. There’s no need to kill them. Leave out a pan of birdseed, when they go to it, one by one, trap them and send them outside. It’s possible many of the birds came in accidentally and don’t know how to get out.
I take it this person has never shopped at a farmers market. Wait ’til they find out what’s in the fertilizer.
I don’t think they’re goldfinches, they’re too sleek. I think they’re just sparrows.
I’ve seen them in Acme and Fresh Fields. I think they fly in and out the receiving doors; I didn’t notice any bird poo or feathers. Then again, I haven’t seen the tops of the shelves.
Call the local health dept!! I can’t believe the “no big deal” attitude in this thread. There is plenty of unpackaged food in a store to be concerned about — salad bar, seafood, bakery, nuts — in addition to produce. I’m sure there’s someone wiping the bird crap off soda bottles, etc. — you’re going to buy food articles that had bird crap on them? The manager is a stiff and I’m glad someone alerted headquarters
@melanie.dawn: I doubt there’s just *one* sparrow. You just see one at a time.
@Hossofcourse: Preach it, brother. I’ve never seen a bird in a grocery store before. Even if I had, that’s still not cool. If it is, I’m going to start bringing my dogs into Safeway, too.
LOL I know that store, it’s in the same shopping center as Microcenter. I guess it’s time for me to visit that store to see for myself lol.
Birds eat bugs.
I shop at that Safeway all the time… after the local Wegmans, it is better than the other supermarkets in the area. I’ll be sure to wash my fruit better from now on, though.
I think I’ve been to that exact store… I got into a fight with a sparrow over the last can of albacore. Told me to drop dead
You know, most of those fresh veggies are not washed before they enter the store… and guess where veggies grow (for the most part)? Yep, outside. Guess who else lives outside? Birds. So, this is probably not the first time your food has been exposed to birds.
Wash your food. Don’t buy food that is obviously damaged.
Worry more about the animals you don’t see (rats, mice, cockroaches).
Problem solved.
You do realize that this will cause the cost of food at Safeway to rise…after all, someone has to pay for that ‘organic atmosphere’.
They live in the Lowes & Home Depot stores, too.
I don’t know what to tell you except they can’t peck into cans of Spaghetti’O's and if you don’t already wash your produce, nothing I can say here will help you.
They’re birds. They live in nature. Which is where your food comes from. Deal with it.
I have never seen a bird in the grocery store around the corner from my place (open 24/7 very convenient) but I have seen chipmunks wandering around in there.
@Randy: Possibly, but have you ever tried to give a written citation to a bird? They just ignore you or, worse yet, sit there and mock you, twittering and twittering away. They think they’re so much better than us with their wings and songs and adorabliferousness.
The Costco in California I used to go to a lot was always full of birds. I guess they preferred their bread and produce in bulk.
If yer gonna shoot the birds.. make sure you have a hunting license…. Yes its required in most states.
@marsneedsrabbits: I think we’d all be perfectly happy if they were staying in nature. Safeway, however, isn’t exactly the great outdoors.
For the record, that Safeway store is not in a “poor state”, they just renovated it completely a couple years ago and every time I shop there it is clean. As for the bird, if you see bird poop on an item, don’t buy it, and who doesn’t wash their produce these days after the E Coli scares of the past year?
You don’t need a hunting license to shoot pests (house sparrows are invasive species, if that’s what these are) in any states I know about, or farmers would have a hell of a time trying to deal with coyotes or pigeons in the barn or whatever….
Discharging a firearm in a store, though? Dunno about that.
That’s how you know the produce is REALLY fresh!
This is my Safeway store as well, it’s like 30 degrees outside, let the birds hang out in the warmth. You must not be a pet owner.
Ever been to a Farmer’s Market? They’re outdoors, so lot’s of birds, bugs, etc. Get over it and wash stuff off. And don’t you dare do any harm to those birds.
/card-carrying member of National Wildlife Federation
Whatever. There are birds living in the Super WalMart, in the local shopping mall, and there were some living in the stock room of the grocery store where I used to work (though I never saw any out on the floor).
Just wash your produce. Do you have any idea how many people have picked up that apple before you, and where their hands have been?
At least they’re not rats.
Now if they were hawks or Peregrine Falcons, that’d be really cool.
Birds live in all kinds of stores. So do rats, rice, roaches, and other vermin. At least birds chirp and add to the atmosphere. Seriously though… my dad used to be an animal relocator and he’d get calls for birds in stores all the time. They are notoriously hard to catch because they just fly away to a high spot where you can’t even begin to reach them. The easiest way to get rid of them is poison, but people would go apeshit if you dared suggest that you kill a sparrow or two.
@hexychick: *mice, not rice
@ppiddyp: Actually about 10-15 years ago I think, some noodle head food store worker did get busted for shooting at birds in a food store with -get this, a shot gun. I think it was in NJ but cannot pull anything up on it- it might have only been a local report. No patrons were injured but the idiot worker did get a ticket and damage the store ceiling.
Yeah I’d seen birds in the big box home improvement stores but nothing ever beat my cousin’s mice in KMart story when he worked there during high school. He and another kid on the evening shift were told to clean up and move the bulk dog food bags from an aisle end shelf base near the home and garden area. This was in one of the typically dead corners of the store with the wrong product positioned in it so the bags hadn’t sold in a long time.
They got the store shop vacuum and some brooms to vacuum up the dog food chunks from the ripped bags. As they started to move the bags they soon realized that they had a mouse problem too as the critters started to jump from some of the torn bags they were moving around. Lacking any way to catch them, they did the obvious and cranked up the vacuum and started to try and suck them up. He said that when they got to the bottom of the stack, they were to move the endcap base to clean around and under it.
The description he gave was incredible as apparently the mice had converted the 6″-8″ void under the metal base into a mouse nest resort with torn dog food bag paper and other soft stuff from the surrounding departments. That and the literal dozens of mice that started to haul ass when they picked up the base. He said he was vacuuming the mice up as quickly as he could as the other guy was trying to broom them back towards him as the ran around disconcerted from the vacuum noise and being awakened from their nest.
He said it was one of the grossest things had had done. Then when they vacuumed as many as they could plus the nest they still heard some of them scrabbling around in the vacuum. So they went and filled a 5 gallon pail of water and sucked about half of it into the vacuum to drown them. He said that they then left the vacuum outside with a note to the manager that they were not going to open it up- that he should. My cousin said that he never found out what the manager did with the dead mice in the vacuum but that the store was visited by an exterminator soon after that.
Actually about 10-15 years ago I think, some noodle head food store worker did get busted for shooting at birds in a food store with -get this, a shot gun. I think it was in NJ but cannot pull anything up on it- it might have only been a local report. No patrons were injured but the idiot worker did get a ticket and damage the store ceiling.
I think the only Safeway I’ve been to that didn’t have birds in it is the one in the basement of my building in Rosslyn.
Still, I’ve been to a ton of grocery stores that have had them – not to mention other big stores such as Home Depots (the only place where I actually saw bird poop on the merchandise, and that was the one in 7 Corners – I won’t go back there again) and Wal-Mart.
When I used to work at Kroger’s down in Roanoke we’d have races with the lobsters. If they got stuck under the shelves we’d have to chase them out with brooms.
Seriously, though, grocery stores are like restaurants – you really don’t want to know what goes on behind closed doors.
You live in Fairfax and you shop at Safeway? There’s your problem right there. You’ve been blessed to be within a 5 mile radius of a Wegmans and instead you shop at dirty, filthy, overpriced, digusting bird pooping, crappy rotten produce selling, expired dairy product pushing, wait 45 minutes to check out 2 items that took you 3 minutes to pick off the shelf hell hole.
Maybe instead of complaining to crappy Safeway on how crappy they are you should get yer head outta yer ass and realize how bad Safeway sucks and how awesome Wegmans is and start shopping at Wegmans!
I work at a Wegmans and we have a bird problem too. The store is a little over a year old, but they didn’t seem to appear until recently…probably because of the cold weather.
It is definitely a health hazard, but nobody seems to care. We have had bird food lures and things set up, but the birds are smarter. It is usually only one or two, but they always fly around the 2nd floor cafe area (tons of fake trees), which is not sanitary at all. I guess they’ll wait until one poops on someone who is eating their meal before they do anything.
I used to work at a grocery store in a mall, and every so often, a parrot or similar bird would get loose from a nearby pet store and fly all around my store, squawking excitedly, provoking reactions ranging from bemusement to panic among the staff and customers. I remember this happening at least three times, and it was always awesome.
<sarcasm> Really? I had no idea! </sarcasm>
Birds can also live at:
- Walmart
- Home Depot
- Lowe’s
- Old navy
- Your attic!
Basically they’ll take up root in any place where they’re not driven out.
Most stores do not have the ladders/cherry pickers that will
allow them to reach to roof height, nor want to _deal_ with the birds
in the first place.
I think there is a possibility of worse things than bird poop on the veggies..@B: