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Seasonal shopping has an expiration date, and pumpkins are especially unforgiving when customers wait until the final haunting hour.

The day before Halloween, one frazzled mother arrived after dragging her children across town searching for any usable gourds.

What remained at this garden center had endured snow, thawing sunshine, and several weeks of increasingly squishy decline.

Read on how it all went down.

Panic because of procrastinating pumpkins.

“Last year, I was working at a place that sold pumpkins at Halloween.

By October 20th, our pumpkins weren’t really in good shape.

We would get all of our pumpkins in early to mid-September and they were kept outside in our garden section.

Some of them were kept in places where they were covered, but some of them were not. Which in hindsight was probably a poor idea.

It’s pretty unpredictable in those parts…

The place I live has very erratic weather. It can snow one day and be very warm the next day. It also tends to start snowing here around October.

This means the pumpkins would get snowed on, maybe even get frozen, but the snow or ice would melt pretty either that day or the next day and they’d be wet while in the sun all day.

A lot of the pumpkins we had at the very end of October were pretty rotten and mushy.

This story happened the day before Halloween.

By that point, we didn’t have a lot of pumpkins left because most people get their pumpkins weeks before Halloween. The pumpkins we still did have could be squished.

Well, they did wait a while…

On that day, it was really cold and it had snowed fairly recently and some of the pumpkins were actually frozen solid.

Quite a few people were buying last-minute pumpkins that day and a lot of them were pretty unhappy we had no good ones left.

There was this one woman who came in with a few kids to get pumpkins. They were outside looking at the ones we had left for a while before they came in. Each kid had their own small pumpkin.

The woman seemed a bit frazzled.

The customer was honest.

While I was checking her out, I asked the woman how her day had been and she looked at me, looking really upset and mad, and said “I’ve been going on a wild goose chase for moldy pumpkins since I got off work”.

She told me she and her kids went to a local pumpkin patch to get pumpkins earlier that evening, but there were none there and they’d gone to another store before us where there also were none.

She started ranting to me about how her evening had been and about how she expected it’d be easy to go grab pumpkins and I just let her because this woman really did look she’d had a tough night.

Why not be nice to customers for a change…?

I can’t quite remember, but I’m pretty sure I did give her and everyone else getting pumpkins a discount because they were so past their prime.

I felt bad for her, but at the same time, you really cannot expect it to be easy to find good pumpkins the day before Halloween.”

That sounds like a frustrating experience for the customers, but hopefully they’ll learn to get their pumpkins earlier next time.

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

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This reader shared their thoughts.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who cleverly shuts down customer arguments about closing time.

And this individual chimed in.

The employee listened kindly and discounted the surviving pumpkins, even though their condition was hardly surprising on October 30.

This mother finally found some, but her quest proved procrastination can transform a simple holiday errand into a moldy scavenger hunt.

She waited until the eleventh hour and found the gourds already striking midnight.