Fun fact: I used to work with a bread distributor as a stocker for a local grocery. You see, some parts of the grocery store are stocked by industry people, not by the stores staff. Notable examples that I've seen are bread and chips.

As far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever the hell you want with those clips. Use them, don't use them, I assure you that neither I, nor the bread industry gives any shits about it.

Those clips aren't made for you, and by the time you get the bread in your hands, their only remaining use is to keep the bread closed. All other functions have already been fulfilled.

Now, recently, in my area, they moved to paper based clips, which I can only imagine is driving the bread workers completely insane, because by comparison, they suck. To put it simply, there's two main pieces of information on the clip that I would care about while working as a stock person: the date on it, and the color. The date, is obviously the "best before" aka "sell by" date. Anything after that day would be considered stale and should be thrown out. The color actually indicated the day it was made. Usually we kept things on the shelf for about a week before it either sold, or the sell by date passed.... Not all the time, but often.

I don't remember what days were which colors, but 90% of the bread coming in on a particular day had the same color tag, say it's a Monday and Mondays color is red. So before I put anything up, I'd check for red tags on the shelf. If I saw any, I'd check their sell by date and if it's today (or before today), they would get tossed. Everything else would be sorted by color and shoved off to the side as I stocked each item. I would put a line of fresh product in the back and place the older stock in front, tags out. Rotating the stock as I went.

This made it really easy and quick to see what's old and needs to be placed front and center to give it the best chance of being picked up by someone who doesn't give a shit about the sell by date. Every day was a different color, so it was hard to get wrong. Almost everything with a particular color had the same sell by date on it.

In the years following my adventure in bread stocking, I had a very easy time finding a fresh loaf. I wouldn't need to waste my time checking every tag, I'd just shift the front row around to see what's at the back and what color the back row tags are. If they were the same color as the tags up front, I knew all of the bread on the shelf was from the same day, and it didn't matter what one I picked, they would all have the same date.

So while all of you are checking tags individually (or giving up and taking whatever), I knew I had the freshest loaf every time.