There's a video of a grocery trip in Alaska, the prices are insane. https://youtu.be/3TVlmmVqgnQ
Thanks for sharing! What a fun and scary video!
A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
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Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#92My one trip to Molokai some 7 or 8 years ago. The main market had staples that were primarily split up bundles from Costco. So it seems like (given the other posts) a common model.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it works, it's delicious and you end up eating heaps more than usual. If your first two or three attempts a baking bread fail, then you end up becoming one of those people with 85% of a 20lb bag of flour in the cupboard waiting for the weevils to move in... (The temp calibration on my oven is way out. Doesn't matter too much for roasting chickens or cooking lasagne, but baking is more temperamental than that, and…
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.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#94Earlier 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.
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 there later tonight.” She then laughed and continued, “Hey, this is Korea!”
The delivery network of small highly developed countries is simply amazing.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap? And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem. PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain…
> Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap? Because the commercial bakery wants the flour in a 100 lb bag, but the retail store needs 100 1 lb bags. And the commercial packaging lines can't easily swap to packing their product into 1 lb bags.
Not to single you out, but multiple people made that same basic comment despite that being the point of my post. Was this unclear?
And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.
I generally aim for clear and casual communication and it seems like I messed up somewhere.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed: even if you get a ship for free, the crew is not free. Unless you're a certified captain already, you probably can't just operate the ship yourself. Also, now you have to pay for maintenance, fuel, mooring, loading and unloading cargo, etc. I suspect that $3k is not sufficient to start and sustain such an operation, so some steps are clearly missing. (Can't help but remember Grim Fandango, where a similar tra…
My favourite example is Roman Abramovich, who somehow made the transition from reselling rubber ducks from his apartment in 1991 to having $100M to buy an oil company worth $3B, to obscene oligarch wealth a decade later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich
90s Russia was indeed a bizarre place.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#97One of the problem is people do not pay for his overheads and insurance need. The town would not survive long by goodwill. Have to pay.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#98There'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 the welfare of the entire community and does so even under "normal" conditions. And these are not remotely normal conditions.
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#99That'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-…
What causes a town not large enough to support a grocery store to have a U-Haul rental?
U-Hauls don't have to be rented, you can buy them: https://trucksales.uhaul.com
Re: A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hate to be the one the point it out, but have you considered you might not be great at baking?