Inexplicable Can of Mystery

Shopping is an exhausting ordeal, and we can hardly blame customers for grabbing a refreshing beverage off the shelf and having a drink. While we appreciate it when a customer brings their sparkling, lightly flavored treat to the register to pay for it, oftentimes it just ends up on a random shelf to be collected and discarded by that shift’s workers.

OR DOES IT?!?!

Stina Anderson, manager of a southern California area Sam’s Club, was walking the sales floor when she saw it amongst the tubs of mixed nuts: an opened can of pamplemousse LaCroix. Which, in and of itself, isn’t a big deal. You can go to any area of the store any time of day and find an empty drink can or food wrapper. No, what made this can so odd is that Stina was sure she’d seen it in the exact same place the previous day.

“I remember walking through the sleeves of the snack section,” recalls Anderson, “and seeing it there Monday evening. Then Tuesday morning, there it was again in the same place.”

But the question stands: Was it the same can or a new one?

“I don’t know,” says Anderson. “I guess it’s entirely possible that it was an entirely new can left by an entirely different customer, but I’m not entirely convinced.”

We asked Dan Orbach, a merchandise and stock associate who was in charge of the area Monday night, to give us his thoughts on this mystery.

“Yeah, no,” says Orbach, “I picked that up. That one there now is a new one.”

So there you have it.

OR THERE DO YOU HAVE IT?!

“Yo, Dan’s lying,” says coworker Jenni Ross. “He knows he never picks those cans up, and I don’t blame him. Them shits is nasty. I once accidentally touched the rim of one and I was out sick for like four days. And also, I don’t know why you’re asking me anyway, you should be asking the cleaners why they’re not picking them up when they clean the store at night.”

And ask we did because we definitely already thought of that and were going to anyway.

“We do remove debris from shelves as part of our nightly routine,” says Marvin Becker of the store’s cleaning crew, “but it’s easy to miss things. It’s a big store and we’re stretched pretty thin, so it’s hard to get every single piece of trash, you know? And you can’t always tell at a glance what’s trash and what’s misplaced stock. So if your question is, is the can of LaCroix in snack foods the same one that was there Monday night, I’d have to say it very possibly could be, but there’s also an equal chance it isn’t..”

Well that was pointless.

“These people steal LaCroixs all the time,” adds Ross. “It’s like Karen’s favorite drink and shit.”

So in reality, the only way to know for sure is in the answer to the question of whether or not Dan Orbach can be trusted. I guess we’d word it something like “Can Dan Orbach be trusted?”.

WELL?! CAN HE?!

Manager Stina Anderson says that no, no he cannot.

“I hate to say that I distrust any member of my staff,” says Anderson before explaining why she distrusts a member of her staff, “but he admitted that both cans, if it was two separate cans, were pamplemousse LaCroix. Then he changed his story and said the one from Monday night was peach-pear before rethinking and adding that it was actually a diet Sierra Mist, as if anyone would actually drink that.”

“That’s not true,” says Orbach in his defense. “I think I remember it being a grape Crush now.”

While we may never know the answer to this festering brain worm, there are several unanswered questions that will surely haunt the store’s staff forever:

• Is Dan Orbach a lying scumbag, simply mistaken, or telling the truth?

• Should the cleaning crew receive better pay and benefits to attract candidates more likely to stay on thus resulting in a cleaner, neater store?

• Why didn’t Stina just pick it up when she saw it again on Tuesday? Is she somehow above that kind of work?

• Is the can still there? Oh my god it is! Why is the can still there?!

• Is someone placing cans of pamplemousse LaCroix amongst the snack nuts as some kind of message and, if so, to what end?

• Is LaCroix really Karen’s favorite drink?

We’ll most likely never know the answer to these questions (except the one about the cleaners, that’s a no-brainer) and trying to find the answers is as fruitless as trying to find the flavor in a can of LaCroix. Some riddles, unfortunately, don’t have answers, and this one only has an economy-sized box of mystery containing many more packs of enigma not marked for resale.