> pickers I would imagine would do the opposite (i.e. get rid of the store's oldest stock first).

Maybe if they worked for the store, but why would they do that if they worked for an independent service with ratings and customer support?

Personally, my experience even with first-party shoppers is that they seem to select for good quality. I've never gotten unpleasant produce or near-expired items. I'm sure it happens, but I'm also sure it produces plenty of support calls.

I've gotten spoiled or damaged stuff when doing curbside pickup at Target. But it is also pretty easy to get a refund if you click a few buttons in the app and attach a photo. My guess is that in this case, the pickers are optimizing for throughput and not going out of their way to pick better or worse items.

can confirm. I work in a store doing picks. We are all students and generally do not care. If customers aren't looking food + product is being thrown into a cart haphazard. There are a few of us who care a bit but not many. Luckily work for a store that is too inept to track our performance. I can only imagine that this gets worse when employees are monitored.

I used to pack shelves for a supermarket and I believe at the time (~15 years ago) we had a two hour window in which perishables could be out of the fridge. Usually we'd wheel out pallets from the stockroom fridge or freezer onto the floor, move all the boxes off the pallet into their rough locations on the floor, and then pack each box into the fridges sequentially (effectively batching up the sorting/locating/carrying work). If stock sat on the floor without getting into the fridge for more than two hours, or in the rare occasion there was a power outage and the fridges or freezers were out for more than two hours, stock had to be written off.

All that to say the allowed timeline might be longer than you expect (or desire)!