Why grocery stores offer you free samples

I’d like to go back to a more innocent time when I was excited to see a slice of cheesecake in a paper cup or be handed a stack of veggie chips that I didn’t really want to eat. Sample day at grocery stores and superstores was a wonderful day — a time when shades of the Old Country Buffet were seen in aisle three, and you could have an egg roll, limited-release soda, and a cheese that you didn’t even bother to read the name of before you gobbled it up.

But that was before the dark days of semen-tainted Greek yogurt and The Street’s breakdown of the economics behind free samples.