Fuzzy strawberries

You know those horror movies where something causes time to speed up and you see stuff going bad and then decaying at an accelerated rate?

(Ok I have no idea if such a movie actually exists, but bear with me)

Well, I got a mini-experience of that with the batch of strawberries we bought at Costco on Saturday. When we bought the strawberries, they were mostly a lovely shade of red, with maybe a spot or two of squishedness where they were pressed against the plastic. That's normal, right? Within a day or two, I was already noticing that some of the strawberries were developing squishy splotches and probably were going bad. Fine, that's somewhat normal I guess...

Monday morning, I picked through the carton to bring some strawberries to work. I noted that they seemed to be going bad fairly rapidly, and told my bf we probably would have to throw out a lot of them soon. But by "going bad", I meant there were some black splotches on a lot of them and it was hard to find more than 8-10 mostly good ones.

Monday night, we get home and I discover to my shock that the entire carton is overgrown with mold spores, like it'd been sitting out for weeks and weeks. And then, when my bf went to pick up the carton and throw it out, a huge rush of strawberry juice came spilling out, puddling on the counter, dripping over the cabinets, and splashing on the floor. Somehow, in the course of one day, not only had mold grown all over the strawberries, but it'd eaten through the strawberries or something enough that they'd basically decayed in the case and turned to juice. I've never seen anything like it. Ugh.

Guess we're not keeping strawberries around our condo! So far the carton of Clementines that were sitting next to the strawberries seem fine... yay for self-contained fruit!

ETA: OK I've been googling and apparently we should have left the strawberries in the fridge, and even then they probably wouldn't last more than a couple days. Still, I didn't think it was *that* fast!