Hi all, thank you for signing our rapidly growing petition! Many of you have shared personal experiences working at CVS and expressed your feelings of frustration related to CVS’s practices of throwing away perfectly safe food and merchandize. And you’re not alone!

Your stories are powerful! Your stories deserve to be heard. And we need to hear more of them to pressure CVS to make actual change. Here’s Alvin’s story, where he shares his experience as a CVS employee in New York City. Please also share your story in the comments below.

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I’ve been thinking about this for a long time - it feels like I’m part of the problem. CVS makes us destroy food and products if the packaging is slightly damaged or if they’ll expire within the month, and I can’t help but think it’s morally wrong.

Sometimes I’m walking down an aisle, and I see a box that’s slightly damaged. I ask my manager, “Should I throw it away?” And they’d say: “Yes. Customers don’t want to buy products with damaged boxing.” So we throw products away.

I wish we could take them home. But leadership at CVS is paranoid, thinking that employees would destroy merchandise on purpose just to take it home. Of course we wouldn’t! But making minimum wage and without many perks, it’d be nice to be able to take food and products home that we know are good to consume. At the very least, we should donate them.

Three key things upset me the most.

First: the amount of over the over-the-counter drugs and vitamins we throw away. For example, if today (in April) I have a daily vitamin with 100 tablets that expires in June, the rationale is that people wouldn’t be able to get through the entire product in the limited amount of time, so we have to throw them away.

Second: The amount of products we throw away after holidays. After Easter weekend, I threw out six huge bags full of Easter-themed products.

Third: The rule-of-thumb that says we have to throw away food a month before its expiration date.

We're throwing away food someone could eat. It's wrong no matter what way you look at it.

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Alvin is a Computer Science student. He’s been working at CVS since early 2018.

Share your story in the comments below.