California bans 'sell by' labels, hoping to cut food waste
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-11-03/...
I wonder how many they've added in 5 years. Do all these laws improve peoples lives?
I feel like the quality of life is similar between the two. I don't feel like I was getting anything for the 13%+ extra taxes I was paying in California.
Nearly every California program has a huge amount of wastage. Take:
- High speed rail - 10x the cost of comparable European programs, still haven't built anything. Deadlocked by regulation, lawsuits, and poor planning.
- Or all the fraud in the hospice program, unchecked for years until some YouTuber just... went up to one and made a video.
- Or spending over $1M/homeless on housing the homeless and not being able to do so.
California is a lot of talk (regulations, state programs, taxes) coupled with extremely poor execution.
And just like you describe, it would've been ok if all of the tax money went to the people it was meant to be, but unfortunately CA is built upon n number of middle man companies who each take something off the top.
Some people might argue that it's not meant to be about what you personally get back. Social contract and all that...
I get your other points but this part was phrased in an unfortunate way.
For example, I would be happy paying those 13% taxes in Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore! (Some even have lower taxes.) But I felt that money was being totally wasted in California.
I genuinely think CA is something like <10% as efficient with tax money as these countries, and it's largely because certain groups take it as a personal attack when you imply tax inefficiency is a problem.
Already addressed in my other reply.
Where, pray tell, is this state with zero taxes? Próspera?
Incorrect. For high earners, tax burden differs dramatically between states, even when you consider all kinds of tax.
But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.
They did something right fifty years ago. Now? No. They're doing nearly everything wrong.
Top-two elections coupled with rigged ballots so voters can't really choose, and no one can prove anything (and it's against the law to try). Government program after government program that fails to solve basic problems because the money seems to up and disappear, and when the public calls for an audit the person doing the stealing gets to say "No."
187,084 homeless in California in 2024. 181,934 homeless in California in 2025 after 2024 spending of more than $2.5 billion (with a B) on homeless programs. They would have done better if they had just given every homeless person $13,363. It's the same expenditure.
Instead they spent $485,437 per person helped (5,150). The median household income in California in 2024 was $100K. So they spent four times the median household per person helped. Those are bad results.
They're driving out businesses. They're destroying the infrastructure that let them build the economic juggernaut of agriculture and tech (reservoirs left dry, water management mishandled deliberately, forest mismanagement contrary to decades of evidence).
Generally speaking, I've liked their food and consumer product safety regulations, and most of those have been emulating Europe, but most of the rest they've gotten wrong. They're still rich because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but they're driving away tech, and while Hollywood has a long way to tumble, it's on its way to doing that to itself.
California has a significantly better climate to be homeless in, so you'd want a bus ticket from Minnesota or whatever to there too if you were homeless.
Could be inertia.
The salary requirement for job postings has been AWESOME. Saves so much time and you can see if your company is paying market rates, realize if you are underpaid etc. Definitely made my life better. Other states are following suit! Employers hate it, haha. California, Colorado, NY, Illinois, Washington, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawaii all have this law now.
Another common-sense law I want is a holiday for elections so that more people can vote.
Some examples:
* ARL / Automatic Renewal Law: If a company allows you to sign up for a subscription online, they also must provide an immediate, straightforward way to cancel it online.
* SB 478: No bullshit junk fees tacked on to prices. Any price displayed, be it for concerts, hotels, or whatever else, must be the full, out-the-door price.
* SB 244: Right to Repair: Electronics and appliance manufacturers must make diagnostic tools, manuals etc available for at least 7 years after manufacture.
However, California's CARS Act, which took effect July 1, 2025, prohibits misrepresentations about the costs or terms of purchasing, financing, or leasing a vehicle, including the availability of vehicles at an advertised price.
America has such an aversion to including taxes on a listed price so I doubt that will ever be included.
But if you look closer there is a hint to what is going on. According to the US News article these are the 10 most regulated states: California, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Florida, Massachusetts, Louisiana.
These are the 10 least regulated: South Carolina, Michigan, Wyoming, Kansas, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho.
Note: the US News article says they had to omit some states due to limited availability of data. Also that list is from 6 years ago. I found a later list without those omissions.
It is mostly the same, with the addition of some of the states the US News list had to skip, and the order is quite a different in the two bottom 10 lists.
Combining the lists these are the most regulated states (in alphabetical order): California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
These are the least regulated: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming.
One thing that stands out about the first list is that most of them are major players in a variety of major industries. The second list doesn't seem to be nearly as diversified.
I bet if you dove into the details of regulations this would be a big factor. The top list has more regulations simply because they have more to regulate. In any given field they don't necessarily have more regulations than other states, but they have more fields that are big enough to need regulation. More diversity also means more conflict between different industries which will tend to increase the need for regulation.
A key aspect of this, and why we aren't overwhelmed with just keeping up with regulations, is it is the breadth of the regulatory systems that leads to the high counts. not the depth. You only have to deal with a few branches in this wide tree.
For example the US News article says that the most regulated industry is administrative and support services, such as unemployment services, collection agencies, and call centers. All of us not involved in such services can pretty much ignore that big chunk of regulation.
There is a similar thing with the federal tax code. The Internal Revenue Code is around 7000 pages, and the Federal Tax Regulations are another ~70000 pages. But a lot of that is because of the breadth of the US economy, and another contributor to the size is that the government uses per industry tax incentives and penalties as a way to encourage or discourage things that they want to influence. The net result is the tax code and regulations are full of things that 99% of taxpayers (individual and business) can completely ignore.
In any case I think the new way is better.
And from a grocery store's point of view, product that's on the shelf too long isn't selling. It's taking up space that could be used for something else.
All it does is standardize "sell by" labels to be more transparent. The extent of the ban is the explicit phrasing "Sell By" which is itself confusing since the manufacturer has some estimated consumption interval that is tacked onto their actual expiration date. Sell By gives the customer has no idea how much padding they are adding to their estimate and when the thing actually goes bad.
All this law really does is it standardizes the labels manufacturers can use to "BEST if Used by" for quality concerns or "USE by" for safety concerns. A lot of manufacturers already do this, so it is a pretty minimal law There are probably more pressing issues in Sacramento, but a small improvement is always welcome.
In my own case, we have a brand of bread that does “sell by”. There is not uniform standard on how many days after the date, the bread is safe to consume. Internet wisdom gives you a wide range.
Agg uses like 80% of consumer water. Almost all of this is land that has only been farmed since the Feds build a bunch of water projects starting in the 30s.
Most of the irrigated farm land is owned by big corporations and extremely wealthy families. They push a narrative of mismanagement and shortages to get urban areas to use less and less while they resist investing in better irrigation methods.
...
> Under the state’s bill, “sell by” dates can still be included on products as long as they are “coded” — information that is aimed at retailers rather than consumers.
This is about obfuscating "sell by" dates so customers don't get confused. They might not necessarily add another date you can read easily. Then if the grocery store forgets to replace old stock, you will never know.
But maybe someone can write an app to read the codes?
Absorbent pad adds to the price also hides the "purge".
Harder to find meat without thousand poked holes (tenderizing)
Can't tell if meat are colorized to hide browness.
Time for me to visit my local butcher for a quarter cow, butchered.
Also a bigger freezer chest too!
"Packed On" or "Processed On" is the most accurate way to label meat, IMHO.