Man, that 3-pound chuck roast, plump and red, looked good. Oh, the tasty dinners you could make with it. The problem was it was sitting warm atop some random supplies in an unrefrigerated corner of Costco.

Having already secured the items we knew we needed, my wife and I were in a wandering, browsing daze when we came across this unfortunate oddity. It doesn’t take a meat scientist to feel viscerally how wrong this was.

Even my wife, who doesn’t exactly celebrate the killing of animals for food, understood that an animal died for that product to feed people — and yet, there it was going to waste. If it wasn’t just laziness — the meat department was only 30 yards or so away — then it must have been ignorance.

There are so many ways to go with this: We could say Americans are spoiled with a supply of food like nowhere else in the world, and they take for granted those spoils. We could say the wider the gap between farms and suburbs, the less understanding there is of what it takes to get food to store shelves. We could go a la recall and say the industry needs to do more to educate the consumer.

Or, we can just say this was one incident, and that some consumers are stupid. Accepting and assuming that as fact, what opportunities might that present?

I’ll leave it to meat companies to come up with the educational marketing, if they haven’t already exhausted themselves. But again, we’re assuming that all the educational marketing in the world won’t get through to this level of stupid.

And I know retail merchandising and design is a calculated thing: As in, Costco positions its most important merchandise — meat, poultry and seafood — at the back of their warehouses, knowing shoppers must pass everything to and from that department. That makes sense to me.

I wonder, though, when I put my food waste thinking hat on, if that dimwitted shopper who left a perfectly wholesome and nutritious cut of cow in Aisle Wherever would have bought the item if there were checkout registers in the meat department itself, or if there were other self-checkout options dispersed in various locations throughout the store.

I know that the chuck roast chucker wasn’t thinking along the lines of food safety, as perhaps that person was not looking forward to a long line at the front of the store or perhaps had too much time to contemplate the relatively high cost of a hefty portion of beef. But I do wonder sometimes if selecting meat at the back of the store first, then meandering the aisles in search of whatever else, make sense when that gives it the most time to warm.

I’m not smart enough to have the answers, and maybe it’s as simple as writing off as stupidity, which needs no further explaining. But that stranded chuck roast sure got me thinking.

What is your thinking on this?

Here's the beef?

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