Why do customers do this?

They probably think the behind 6ers are colder (which they may well be). The average beer drinker has no concept of beer being date sensitive.
I don’t buy milk in my town. Too many bad experiences. I drive 10 miles to get milk or I do without. The yogurt I buy is sometimes odd tasting locally too.
I’ve seen pallets of frozen food sitting in the aisles of the local supermarket with absolutely no urgency to get it into the display coolers quickly.
I often find the back products to be oldest.

When buying wine I always look for the oldest bottle and pick from the darker, in back area.

A supermarket 7 miles away has beer and wine set up so the afternoon sun shines directly on it.
I once told them this is very uncool and they just looked at me like I had two heads.

I’ll do it with pale and/or hoppy beers, or anything in a green or clear bottle. Nothing sucks as much as bringing home a bottle of Saison Dupont and it tastes like a handful of pennies because it’s skunked. After that near-waste of money, I’m gonna go for a bottle that *might* be less light damaged.

I think part of it is that there are tons of factors that cause skunking that are out of customers’ control. This one small thing is something we CAN control. Maybe it helps, maybe not.

I do it with bottles on shelves, grab one from the back a lot of the time, for light exposure reasons. I know it probably makes no difference, just a habit at this point.

I do this with milk at the grocery store, the dates are fresher on the ones in the back. Weird habbit fer ssure.

I got into this habit when buying Milk and it seems to have migrated over to my beer purchasing as well

I like to shuffle the beers around, both on the shelves and in the coolers, just to confuse the issue.

Not so much with six packs, but rather with bottles. I want a bottle that’s got an undamaged label lots of times so I’ll shift around and find one that looks nice if it looks like the first one’s got a scrunched or slightly ripped label. It’s silly, but I do it, mostly because I like to save lables and glue them to my beer fridge.

A better question is, why doesn’t everyone do this? I mean, I guess someone has to take the older stuff from the front of the shelf, whether beer, soy milk or fresh produce, but no thanks. Better you than me, suckers.

Cooler and fresher is what people think.

Originally posted by billk
The average beer drinker has no concept of beer being date sensitive.

Yes you are right, advertising has absolutely zero effect on people. That several year multi-million dollar "born on date" ad campaign a couple years back emphasizing that freshness is important didn’t reach anyone. Nobody listens to ads. Thats why nobody in this country even drinks those beers by Bud or Miller...oh, wait.