What Exactly Is Amazon Grocery's Freshness Guarantee?

When you shop for groceries on Amazon, you may occasionally run into a badge reading "Freshness Guarantee." The badge appears as a green label just below the product reviews. If you hover your cursor on the label, an explanation drops down, essentially letting you know the product is guaranteed to be delivered to you "within any applicable use by, sell by, best by or expiration dates." If the item shows up expired or has any issues, it is eligible for return.

This policy does not apply to everything sold by Amazon Fresh, just anything that has the specific badge; typically produce, dairy, meat, and other fresh grocery items. It can be hard to trust other people picking out groceries for you — you may worry they'll pick a pack of berries full of fuzz. This policy helps alleviate some of that worry. 

The spoiled items don't need to be sent back, saving time on repackaging items for the mail. While this return policy is good, it can't compare to the expansive return policy offered at Costco, where almost anything can be returned.

Amazon recently closed its brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go locations and turned many of them into Whole Foods stores. The Amazon Fresh locations were full grocery stores, while the Go concept was a smaller convenience store. It didn't help that Amazon Fresh locations felt like "Zombie" stores, with minimal employees on hand to help and poorly stocked aisles. Now Amazon Fresh is solely an online grocery store focused on same-day delivery with no physical locations for customers to shop for themselves. This online-only presence makes the freshness guarantee that much more important since customers are not the ones picking produce.

According to posters on Reddit who say they work for Amazon Fresh, the only change for them is that there are no longer customers in their way. Workers are still roaming aisles of produce, packaged goods, and chilled groceries, filling brown paper bags for drivers to deliver. Part of the problem when shopping at the store was when a customer would have a question. Workers in the store were meant to be hitting certain benchmarks for delivery, and answering questions slowed them down. The dynamic is similar to the Aldi cashier who has to train their customers to be efficient so the cashier can hit a certain set of products scanned per hour.