Lemon more, ay
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Note: This one has a lesson about shopping bags that's still relevant right now. Hardly any cartons are available even today. But the shops throw out one to several compressed bales of cartons a day and force the use of their renewable bags.
Monday, December 29, 2003
What happened to cardboard boxes at supermarkets?
I mean that from the bottom of my heart - what happened to being able to take groceries home in a carton? Once upon a time, stores kept a pile of boxes at the checkout and you selected one and all your stuff got put into it - bingo, no plastic bags. Nowadays, we are choking the whole damn world with LDPE bags.
Supermarkets will tell you it's just not economical to keep the steady stream of cartons to the checkouts, that it takes too much employee time to move them around. But. It takes an employee around 20 - 30 seconds per carton to slice dice fold and flatten it, then it takes the same amount of time whether they take flattened cartons out the back or complete cartons out the front, and then it takes extra time to stack the crusher and operate it.
Not economical? Then maybe you have the wrong idea of economy. You're still using the 'Jack' idiom. (Fuck you Jack, I'm okay) That says that as long as you don't have to pay for the problem of plastic LDPE bags filling up the rubbish tips - along with all your neatly pressed bales of flattened cartons, of course - then that's 'economical' or something...
Fact of the matter is, there is going to be a surcharge on plastic bags here in Australia, which keen retailers will pass on to the customer (with interest I'm sure) and that will ensure that people bring their own shopping bags to the stores. And believe me, your interest on the surcharge on the plastic bags that you didn't need to supply in the first place if you'd only bothered to train employees to think as they pack, that won't even begin to cover the cost of checkout ops puzzling over which odd-shaped carry bag to put the breads in, which bag will hold the weight of the frozen goods, and so forth.
Believe me because I'm an early adopter. I have a flotilla of carry bags which I take to the supermarket with me and which I insist are used instead of the plastic bags. And it invariably takes almost twice as long because you see, the bags aren't a standard, the checkout person has to think about things, they have to (instead of just starting a new bag when the preceding one has opnly two items in it) worry about whether they can put a bottle of dishwashing liquid in with the frozen, and so on. And of course, the fact that I have my own carry bags makes it a bit more special, they also tend not to crush stuff together they way they do with plastic bags.
I've often asked for cartons, on the basis that they're way easier to pack, cheaper, and may as well get reused, but hey - I'll keep pissing supermarkets off with my odd assortment of bags until they cave in... hehehe...
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
No comments:
Post a Comment