Bystander photographs evidence of their least favorite store policy: 'Should ... not be legal'

Unopened water bottles in a dumpster sparked outrage, disappointment, and a heated discussion in the r/MildlyInfuriating subreddit.

What's happening?

The poster shared a photo of the plastic products in opened or damaged packages. "People die of dehydration every day," they wrote. "... They coulda sold them individually for about the same price as in the pack instead and made the same amount of money."

Commenters pointed out that companies often cannot sell items individually if they were not labeled that way, though there are alternatives to throwing out perfectly good water.

Why is this important?

Water is the planet's most vital resource, and it is finite. Only 1% of water is readily available, per Earth.gov. It supports ecosystems, industry, agriculture, households, and recreation.

Bottling water is problematic because it removes it from the water cycle, which keeps water in the atmosphere via precipitation, runoff, infiltration, evaporation, and transpiration. So, instead of throwing out full, unopened water bottles as trash, they could at least be poured out, as some people noted.

"At the store I work at they just put the water in the break room when this happens so it doesn't go to waste even when it can't be sold," one commenter wrote.

Is Dollar General doing anything about this?

It wasn't clear in the post which company had disposed of the water, but commenters spent a lot of time talking about Dollar General and its practices, indicating this was par for the course and not the employee's fault.

Furthermore, the company has "a sinister business model," More Perfect Union reported in 2024, with class action lawsuits in three states alleging deceptive pricing practices. It has also been fined over $20 million since 2017 for this theft by deception.

On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to discard certain items. Perhaps the packages or bottles themselves had been recalled, damaged by a pest or tampered with. Plastic water bottles are also a known source of microplastic contamination. If they are left out in the sun, chemicals in the plastic break down and leach into the water, as Food Safety News described.

What's being done about waste more broadly?

Many people argued that the poster's solution to dehydration deaths was not practical or applicable. The desire to find a solution, however, was admirable.

Do you think America has a plastic waste problem? Definitely 👍 Only in some areas 🫤 Not really 👎 I'm not sure 🤷 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

"There is a piece of legislation called Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act of 1996 that explicitly protects companies from liability if they donate expired food," one Redditor said. "The real reason they don't donate is that it's easier to throw it away and corporations don't give a single f*** about the poor."

Another wrote: "People buying this bottled water in the first place is mildly infuriating."

Responding to a user who stated that the bottles were likely not for individual resale, someone else was resolute: "That nonsense should generally not be legal for something like bottled water. Companies should consider themselves lucky to be allowed water rights for such things at all.

"You want something with resale protection? Create something instead of packing up a mandatory building block of life at inflated prices."

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