Out of curiousity:
>>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2%
Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content
A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
151–160 of 236 posts
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#152Out of curiousity: >>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2% Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content
No, we have fat free, 1%, 2%, and full fat.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#153Out of curiousity: >>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2% Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content
No, 2% and whole milk are different in America.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#154Out of curiousity: >>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2% Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content
[deleted]
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting! I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. Or is it just a matter of convenience?
>> I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. I still think about the UK. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK being more than an hour or two from anywhere else.
"an hour or two from anywhere else"
A few moments with Google maps and I found two places in Scotland that are ~23 hours apart by car. :-) And Scotland is only a small part of the UK.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#156Out of curiousity: >>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2% Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content
No, 2% and whole milk are different in America.
Right, it's just the way the author put it in the same sentence makes it sound like 2% is full fat.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival. And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly. Took requests as well. I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.
Can I ask what "ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music" sounds like?
Imagine you’ve given an accordion amphetamines.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting! I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. Or is it just a matter of convenience?
>> I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. I still think about the UK. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK being more than an hour or two from anywhere else.
What you're not taking into the account is the standard of living though. This is totally how some rural communities in Poland worked not that long ago, and you could also say "but hey, Poland is fairly compact, you could drive from the village X to a larger city which has stores in like 30 minutes, what's the deal?", forgetting that for a long time the only vehicle in a village might have been an agricultural tractor, a lot of "daily business" travelling was still done with a horse and a cart. Besides, those rural communities had staples produced locally - my auntie always had a cellar filled to the brim with potatoes, milk from a cow, eggs from chickens, they'd butcher a pig from time to time so a freezer was usually full of meat, local bakery would get a delivery of flour from elsewhere. It's just that "hopping over to a town nearby for shopping" wasn't really an option until mid-90s at least, when the market got absolutely flooded with cheap cars and people found the ability to afford them.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#159That's actually how a lot of businesses in rural parts of Alaska work, even places that don't require a boat or plane to access. My dad lives right off the highway in a small town in Alaska, and the closest thing to a grocery store is an old airplane hanger that one of the locals runs a general store out of. The owner makes weekly trips to Costco, which is ~4 hours away, and buys as much as they can fit into a big U-…
Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival. And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly. Took requests as well. I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.
Same thing in Portugal, but with ridiculously stereotypical Portuguese music.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival. And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly. Took requests as well. I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.
That's interesting! I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away. Or is it just a matter of convenience?
Twenty odd years ago, we had a system like that though, despite there being multiple grocery stores in walking distance. Some people have mobility issues meaning they can't walk / cycle to the shop, but a grocery store on wheels is fine. It was called the SRV Wagen, which stood for "sell rationally together" when the scheme was started in the 70's. There are still 100 of these vans active last year apparently.
Anyway, think of it differently, instead of a need, why not a want? It's not that different from having groceries delivered to your home. Maybe not as scalable, but it's a valid buisiness model, especially in rural areas.
Nowadays I think it's becoming more of a need again; with the migration of people out of the small towns, more and more grocery stores have decided to pack it up because they just don't get enough customers anymore. A mobile shop that frequents multiple towns every week is a valid replacements.
And as another commenter mentioned, it's not limited to just groceries; we also had a fishmonger, and everyone remembers the ice cream truck. I don't see why hipster food trucks don't actually truck around either.
A more recent example, an ice cream truck would park out front of office buildings and ring its bell. A tiny coffee trike would park in the train station in the morning, then do the rounds at the office buildings nearby throughout the day. The important thing with those services is that they consistently appear on the same day and roughly hour, and that they have some kind of audio cue.