I just moved into a new place and food was mis-delivered to my address. There were perishables, so I decided to store it in my fridge and freezer until the owner (would hopefully) showed up. I didn’t want food to go to waste since I didn’t know if they’d show up today or next week, or at all. I kept everything in the original delivery bags with the original tags. Initially, I assumed the old renters of my unit just forgot to change their delivery address. I had no way of knowing if they were still local or somewhere in another state or even another country.

Either way, I felt it best to not risk wasting food so I’d hold onto it for a reasonable amount of time until figuring out what to do with it.

Well, fortunately a few hours later, someone knocks on my door. I open up, and the lady shows me her phone that has a picture of the food that was delivered to my door. Awesome!

Well, she went off on me for “stealing” her food. “You don’t steal people’s food! Why would you do that?!” I explained to her what I just explained to you all, and all she could do was roll her eyes and chew and cuss me out. “Next time you don’t touch my food! You leave it here!” I told her that I’ll just let her food spoil next time, then. I explained that I had no idea of knowing who owned it, how long it’d take for someone to show up, and that I had everything in their original bags with tags completely untouched. She just kept yelling at me.

Was I wrong in my thinking? What would you have done? Risk all that food going to waste?

Edit: thanks for the reassurance everyone 😅 I love the sassy responses a lot of you have recommended. Unfortunately, I have a disability so it’s difficult to assert myself and to communicate as clearly as I would like to. But to answer some of the questions I’m seeing:

1. yeah it’s winter, that occurred to me as well. But the temps swing so much that it’s not safe to keep food outside.
2. I live in an apartment complex so I figured it’d be easy for someone to find my unit if they lived here. But I didn’t know for sure if it belonged to another unit or the previous renter.
3. I thought about contacting the delivery company, but I figured they wouldn’t be able to do much about it since I wasn’t the one who ordered it. It seemed to me that if someone was missing their delivery, then they’d

need to

1. decide to contact the delivery company personally.

I was just trying to keep their food safe if they ever decided to knock on my door.