A recent CNBC investigation has found an alarming variety of products being sold past their expiration dates on Amazon. The worst categoriesare said to be goods from the clearance, closeout, and liquidation sections, which are almost guaranteed to be expired, or almost expired.

“A data analytics firm that specializes in the Amazon Marketplace recently analyzed the site’s 100 best-selling food products for CNBC and found that at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods,” CNBC reported.

The data analytics firm scanned all kinds of products in Amazon’s “Grocery & Gourmet” category, in search of consumer complaints about expired granola bars, hot sauce, and coffee creamer. One Amazon customer complained that a pack of Goldfish crackers was six months past its expiration date.

According to Natural News, one major reason why this is happening is that Amazon has very little control over the items being sold by its third-party sellers. The company has outsourced all responsibility to these third-party sellers to self-regulate themselves.The article states that one Amazon seller once reached out to Amazon, to find out what is permitted to be sold past-date, and he never received a response, despite “numerous inquiries.”

According to CNBC, when Starbucks announced in 2017 that it was closingdown all of its Teavana concept stores, third-party Amazon sellers must have bought up all the discounted tea and tea-related merchandise and started to retail these products on Amazon, even though most of it was already expired.

“Today, you can find Teavana products such as rock sugar and fruit teas listed on Amazon even though they were discontinued two years ago,” CNBC says.

“It didn’t occur to me that you could even sell something that was expired,” one Amazon customer told CNBC after she reportedly received a box of Land O’ Lakes Half & Half creamer packets that all were well past their sell-by dates.

“If I had bought it the first time and it was like that, I never would have bought it at all,” she added.

This has made several consumers wary of making any purchases on Amazon as it has become clear that the company was not carrying out any checks on expired food products before they got dispatched to customers.

“From a quality name that Amazon used to be in 2010, they ended up becoming a cheap Chinese Bazar by 2019,” one Yahoo! Finance commenter once wrote.

In response to the development, Amazon’s says that they have an “A-to-Z Guarantee” that allows customers to return expired items for a refund, customers do not seem satisfied with Amazon’s standpoint, as many believe that the company is supposed to at least confirm that products are in good condition before they are shipped.

It seems that nothing much can be done about the problem because Amazon has refused to accept any wrong-doings. In the past, the company has issued a public statement claiming that it remains “proactive” in making sure that the products sold on its website are safe, legal, and everything that customers expect them to be.