141–150 of 236 posts
There's a slightly different version of this story with a much less snazzy title (weirdly, on the same site, it seems): https://thehustle.co/how-a-remote-alaska-town-gets-its-groce... (It's possible the writing is the same, but one has more photos?) I thought it was a gripping read. Neither title really does it justice. I have submitted it to r/CitizenPlanners because this one store is playing such a critical role to…
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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?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUiA1zP3tU4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4AYnl2TVKg&list=PL_YB4oZW18...
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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?
A very similar system is also common in small towns (population in the low hundreds or fewer) in Spain. Every few days a baker will come driving their van and selling bread, or a truck with fruit, etc. Even doctors and priests follow a similar pattern. It's likely that one could drive for 30 minutes and find an even better selection. That assumes car ownership and the ability to drive, which is not widespread in the…
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Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking. My mother did this. My grandmother did this. Many of my 23 year old friends did this. They end up baking one loaf and then just forgetting about it in the pantry, but they bought a 20 lb bag because of how much they expected to bake.
So where are all the 2lb bags then?
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You can get an oven thermometer for like $3, unless those have also sold out.
This only helps much if the calibration is off linearly - in my case not only is the calibration off but the temperature flux up/down is more pronounced than it should be. I still make do, but it's definitely very easy for stuff to come out burnt or undercooked as a result.
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Some of the prices were insane, some of them are exactly what I pay at my grocery store in Brooklyn. $7.99 for a block of cheese? Yup. But as the weight/volume increases, their prices skyrocket where wight/volume doesn't seem to matter at all here. Obviously that's where the cost comes from. What is interesting is how similar the extremes are. In the middle of nowhere, the cost of the product is dominated by shipping…
> It's only when you go out to the suburbs, probably one of society's least efficient constructions, that you see the lowest prices -- a perfect balance of efficiency, I guess. It is weird and I wonder if there's some lesson in here. I suspect the inefficiencies are just externalized! Rent is low because land is cheap(er) in suburbia, but society pays in increased average travel times* as well as the high costs of ro…
Not for the truckers delivering the goods.
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A very similar system is also common in small towns (population in the low hundreds or fewer) in Spain. Every few days a baker will come driving their van and selling bread, or a truck with fruit, etc. Even doctors and priests follow a similar pattern. It's likely that one could drive for 30 minutes and find an even better selection. That assumes car ownership and the ability to drive, which is not widespread in the…
I used to work in a very small village in France. The bakery from the nearby city would bring a van full of bread to the campsite near the town, the reception would function as a 'depot de pain' for both tourists and villagers.
The scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just that everyone is making it at home instead of buying it with meals at restaurants. One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case. The only explanations I c…
If you look at a family of four you could have gone from two working parents with both children in school to one or both parents at home along with both children. They may not have had much time for baking before. Baking is a useful task since it provides food and can occupy the children if you get them involved. A batch of cookies and some bread or buns every week will substantially increase a household's flour use.
This is partially offset by less commercial baking. However, commercial bakeries buy huge packages of flour and not the smaller bags available in grocery stores. The supply chain needs time to transition to this change in demand.
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I’m American but was living in Seoul at the time. A couple friends and I took an overnight trip to Busan. We were having lunch at a small restaurant, and my friend asks the staff if she can order takeout and have it sent back to her home in Seoul. Mind you Busan to Seoul is 325km. This was mind-boggling to me. I asked her, “How long is that gonna take to get there?!” She was puzzled, looked at me and said, “It’ll be…
Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea
It was expensive of course since it was the fastest way to move stuff (trains are faster than cars), but I imagine that at cost it would be cheap enough for takeout.
That'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.