Like do our grocery essentials really differ enough to justify that everyone take their own car to a grocery store? Like I thought during the pandemic there should be centralized food deliveries, but in retrospect there should just be centralized food deliveries.
It's bad for the economy if there isn't like five middlemen between you and life essentials.
But capitalism is the most efficient system
At getting money to rich people
In addition to this, every family could be given a basic garden-starter kit with seasonal veg seeds + instructions, and a plot in a communal garden so they can grow their own vegetables, fruit, herbs, etc. Vietnam has has a lot of success with distributing land this way for people to grow rice, and the government works with farmers to make sure the price is stable.
not only do we not guarantee staple foods for all, but supermarkets throw out millions of tons of (barely expired) foods every year and deliberately lock the dumpsters so the homeless can't loot them. There are several foods, like plain yogurt, which have artificially low expiration dates and get thrown out long before they truly expire.
I'll never forget when I worked for a supermarket when I was 20 and was made to throw out an entire garbage bag full of cookies that had been only slightly overcooked by the bakery. They tasted great and were NOT burned. I ate as many as I could on the way to the garbage disposal. Had I not been under the direct eye of management I would have found a way to sneak it to the homeless outside.
they’ll sometimes even pour bleach on the food to poison the homeless
“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
How does management not get an are we the baddies moment from that?
Same way that German liberals slept at night with the furnaces running next door. They either deny it or don't care.
The worst part is I like my cookies a little on the crispy side :(
gooey cookies can always be turned into crisp cookies with a few more mins. in the oven. But the reverse is not possible because entropy :trans-sad:
sorry tht would be authoritarian. if you're disabled please starve instead.
Literally happening in Canada right now where disabled people can't live or find housing on the government welfare and are "choosing" to suicide through Klanada's voluntary suicide program. Klanada literally doing means-tested Aktion T-4
dont worry bro its for the
Volkuhsocietal wellbeinguhhgreater gooduh libertyIt actually doesn't sound like a bad idea in principle. Lets terminally ill people commit suicide in a minimally-painful and traumatic way, which I'm all for. Of course, when you just let hopeless people in poverty have access to it, you're doing some real evil shit.
I go to the grocery store as rarely and quickly as possible. I’m usually in there for only fifteen minutes, twenty at most. I’ve timed myself. Yet going there leaves me feeling drained for the rest of the day. I started working on an essay about why I hate grocery stores and it’s 21 pages / ~6000 words long and not finished. There could be another five or ten pages in there too. Grocery stores are an abomination. How many people would be alive right now and not dead from covid because of grocery stores. All of our food could be delivered. It would save so much time and energy. We could eat at worker canteens when the pandemic ends. But as another poster has said, capitalism can’t work without middlemen.
I'm almost glad I got fired. Working grocery for 10 years was such a demeaning soul crushing experience.
Do you mind if I ask you some questions? I can credit you in my essay if you want.
How often do customers insult workers there? What’s the ratio of nice / indifferent / hostile customers like?
Did you basically spend every moment there pleading with the clock to hurry up?
What’s the covid situation like?
Was there any class consciousness among the workers? How many are libs or chuds?
Any interesting stories? What are some things no one knows about working at a grocery store?
And actually, if you felt like just churning out an essay of your own about this, I would read it.
How often do customers insult workers there? What’s the ratio of nice / indifferent / hostile customers like?
At least a couple times a day, as for the ratio probably pretty even but I couldn't say for sure since you always remember the extremes more. I'd say most are indifferent, the number of hostile went way up during the mask restrictions of course.
Did you basically spend every moment there pleading with the clock to hurry up?
Really depends on the day, if it's busy time goes by real fast.
What’s the covid situation like?
The store handled it better than most places. A lot of the clientele however absolutely lost it, I never new how bad the new age lib to qanon pipeline was until the mask rules went into effect.
Was there any class consciousness among the workers? How many are libs or chuds?
Most of my coworkers were pretty based actually. The owners of course were chuds, but we were real close to pushing for a union vote when I got canned and 8 other people ended up quitting either in protest or just because the owners made it clear that nothing was ever getting better there.
Any interesting stories? What are some things no one knows about working at a grocery store?
Oh I have lots of interesting stories, especially from working at a convenience store before then. As for something nobody knows (or at least most people don't think about): All grocery stores get the majority of their stuff from the same vendors, and it almost all gets delivered using the same distribution company, and that distribution company is also owned by Amazon. It's like the amazon web services but behind all retail and grocery trucking.
I never new how bad the new age lib to qanon pipeline was until the mask rules went into effect.
Some anti-vaxx neighbors just moved away (without selling their house), and I believe they're going to live in some kind of anti-vaxx colony somewhere. I overheard one of them talking about it in the post office right before they left. They aren't chuds as far as I know but it's just so strange to me I guess. They were anti-vaxxers before the pandemic and had already pulled their kids out of school because my state requires that kids get their shots in order to attend. Inoculation is basically Global South / African / Ottoman / Chinese medical technology, which is part of the reason I think a lot of white folks are so freaked out about it, even if not all anti-vaxxers are white, and even if they themselves may be unaware of the history of inoculation.
Thanks for these interesting details.
that sounds like a dope ass essay and a really cool idea! are you planning to publish it anywhere?
I’m almost certainly going to have to publish it to one of my blogs because getting an essay published anywhere else is next to impossible. I’ll post it to hexbear when I finish it...probably after the next grocery store trip...
Americans will spend $30 for an Uber driver to deliver them a can of spinach, complain about the astronomical price, and then crack a joke about Venezuelans starving to death because of Communism.
Nah those are super inefficient in terms of amount of packaging per meal. Nationalize grocery stores and GrubHub, then use the GrubHub infrastructure to deliver groceries
If we've got the power to nationalize Amazon we've also got the power to make the minimum wage $69/hr and give literally everyone a pension once they turn 55
high speed rail/maglev -- > local tram/light rail --> bikes/e-scooters/e-buggies
Depends. Weed farms that aren't aiming to be sustainable? Absolutely wasteful. Multi-level rack systems with skylights and recirculating hydroponics systems? You'd basically get the output of 5-10 farms in the space of one. Hydroponics, when done with good nutrition, aeration, and lighting will produce far more fruitful plants than traditional farms, and you don't even need genetic engineering. Add increased crop rotation frequency, no fallow fields, and no seasonality and the system will constantly churn out food. Use aquaponics and you reduce the need for fertilizer.
Aside from lighting, the main issue with indoor farms is microbial disease which can infect an entire facility fairly easily, so workers must properly suit up when entering. But macroscopic pests tend to be easier to control.
Putting them in skyscrapers is silly, though. Real ones go in warehouses.
i always thought the lighting issue would be fixable with like a shitload of collimating mirrors beaming into a warehouse but idk im stupid
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they just another one of those extremely awful exploitative gig-economy ""employers""?
NATOpedia is predictably being useless at answering this sort of question, but the page for it looks awfully similar to Uber Eats which I know is an awful gig-economy delivery service.
To that end lets just cut out the middleman and just do it ourselves. Gig-economy apps are just rentseeking schemes with the app creator being the benefactor.
I mean, ideally I'd imagine it as being able to order levels of preparation. Like have 5 menu items available a week with the ability to order prepared(with eco packaging) food for people who don't have time or the abilities/capabilities to go the whole hog, or to order completely raw unprepared food. This way you also have a meal service for the elderly and disabled.
It's always made sense to me. I believe even some societies in the antiquity provided rations of staple foods to their citizens, especially in times of emergency.
centralized granaries and ration distributions existed in most ancient city states.
Also credit-based economies rather than money-based economies existed back then as well. Adam Smith's "Barter Economy" was pure theoretical speculation that has been proven false by archeology and anthropology. Yet every introductory economics course in the West still teaches it like gospel.
Rome introduced the grain subsidy in 123 BC, which evolved into a grain dole as the urban poor became a larger population (as they were forced off their farms by slave plantations) and the Senate realized that a food riot could potentially get them all killed.
No no, you see, bread and circuses were a bad thing. The people should have been starved or enslaved into useful labor. This is why Rome fell. Second Century Romans went soft.
Ignore the 200 more years of Rome in the west and the 1000 years of Byzantium.
Under communism I'll be a beaurocrat at the bean department. You might say a bean counter :bean:
We basically don't even prioritize feeding staple food to kids in school, or educating them on any way to feed themselves besides buying various packaged corn products.
You show up to someone's house with a bag of rice and beans, and they're unlikely to have anything to make with it that they actually want to eat, outside of certain areas.
What the fuck else are you supposed to do with it, shave the kernels off? That's like the same thing as on the cob
Nothing wrong with boiling corn, but baking it in the husk turns out the tastiest.
I'm a big fan of grilling it. Get about 1/4-1/3 of the cop a little blackened, dust it with Old Bay seasoning, perfection!
i've never had beans that had good taste or mouthfeel, guess i'm just SOL.
It's still an ongoing UK argument as to whether we should guarantee school kids can like, eat lunch.
Totally bonkers. And it's like that for so many crushing social problems; The solutions are both simple and easy, and well proven by other countries, but they're totally unthinkable and alien within the context of Capitalism. It's absolutely bizarre.
You know, food stamp benefits in the US could be a transformational welfare program in the way that social security was, if we simply extended them to all citizens with no strings attached.
You might think that grocery stores or food corps would object to this, but no. They get paid the same amount either way, in fact I would wager their sales would go up as food insecure people are suddenly able to stock their fridges better than ever, and the average person would probably get more of things like milk than they actually use.
For the working poor, stamps would effectively be a stimulus check. Every dollar they aren't spending on food can go somewhere more useful.
As for the wealthy, food stamps/EBT don't cover luxury items, so they can still buy whatever they like. Based on my own experience getting government food, a large number of people would simply choose never to use it as long as they have disposable income to buy something else (when I think of all the money I wasted on convenience store crap when I could have gotten something healthier for free...).
And from an economic sense, programs like food stamps are great Keynesian economic stabilizers, since people will rely on them more (and hence they will inject more government money into the economy) during recessions and less during booms. Frankly if we were serious about doing liberalism well we would structure every one of our social programs roughly in this fashion.
So yeah we should totally do this. But we won't.
I have heard that grocery corporations are actually why food stamps haven't been completely rolled back. If food stamps went away, people would basically be surviving via churches and other charitable organizations, who would absolutely not be purchasing through grocery stores. So they lobby against food stamp cuts.
As always, there's only reason we won't - If workers could refuse shitty minimum wage jobs and reliably know they could still eat/be housed, then almost all major companies would collapse very quickly.
As for the wealthy, food stamps/EBT don’t cover luxury items, so they can still buy whatever they like.
Yes they can. It's a prepaid debit card. Rich people could load a cart full of fancy cheeses and charcuterie if they wanted (which is what I would do lol). You can even buy hot food like pizza or chicken with it in some states.
That's why it's such a good idea. Food is cheap as hell thanks to technology and the food supply in the US is basically state planned anyway. This would be a great way to boost budgets and let people buy nicer quality stuff as well, and increase demand for fresh produce. Just give people a stipend and open up more grocery stores if needed.
Artificial scarcity. Can't make a profit if people can use a free alternative.
