There's enough food to go around, so why on earth do grocery stores across the USA stamp out their leftover baked goods at the end of each day?

I've worked at a grocery store on and off for the last three years. And I have no idea what to make of a practice that I think would be common in every grocery store. At the end of each day, the bakery manager will spoil all of the unused baked good items. This includes full loaves of bread that are completely intact and unopened, full trays of cookies, dozens upon dozens of full bags of donuts, muffins, scones, all kinds of stuff. We'll also go through all of the pastries, pies, and cakes and scrape the outer edges off, ruining them, stamp "D" on the bottom (signifying that they're supposed to be thrown out), and put them on a lift to be trashed. And then we'll put the new baked goods that just came in on the store shelves.<br><br>I've lived in several cities and have worked in several grocery stores, and this is a practice that seems to be consistent everywhere. Who is making this decision? For what reason? I don't understand.<br><br>One grocery store I worked at I asked the manager about this, I told him all of this food is perfectly fine, and that it's wrong to waste it like this. He told me that corporate tells them they have to do it at the end of every day, and that it's the law, and that they would get in trouble if they were caught giving out free baked goods to the employees.<br><br>But here's the thing, it's not the law. There's no law that grocery stores have to throw their leftover food out at the end of every day. Who is making these decisions? For what reason?<br><br>I think this is connected to the grocery store employees across the USA who are forbidden from taking home expired food. Every grocery store has a policy to throw out expired food, but they also have a policy forbidding their employees from taking home expired food. Because they want to bury it all in a landfill and claim it as a "loss" to get a tax break, when in reality, the food is still perfectly fine to eat, as long as you take the outer edge off of it, as you would with any fruit or vegetable that you consume, all of which grow an outer skin to protect their nutrients, and you can't just eat the outside.<br><br>I think the mass production of food across all grocery stores in the USA is connected to the mass starvation across the planet, and to homelessness, and to chronically ill people suffering from nutrient deficiencies because they can't access healthy food. I think there is a clique of billionaires who have a network of secret meetings and agreements that they all adhere to, a network that is completely hidden from the general public. I think they're all colluding together to stamp out leftover food - not just baked goods - to stamp out leftover food from every grocery store across the USA, and to prohibit their employees from taking home expired food so that they can claim it as a "loss" for a tax break, as a way to keep poor people in starvation mode, to weaken them, so that the billionaire elite can continue to expand their wealth and hold more power over society.<br><br>I'm not saying that the grocery store employees are in on it. All of the grocery store managers that I've spoken to seem to have no idea why they're doing this, they just know that they have to follow corporate policy and throw all of this food away, and all of the corporate CEOs and billionaires, of course, will never publicly state that they're doing this to create and sustain starvation across the planet. But I think they're all colluding together in secret meetings, as they have done for centuries.<br><br>Edit: Wow, this blew up. I know that grocery stores donate a lot of their leftover food to shelters and food banks., and that some allow their employees to bring home expired food. But it appears to be true that all of the major grocery store chains stamp out all of their leftover baked good items, and that the decision is made at the corporate level.