Tag: grocery store
The Last Days of the Barcode
Once upon a time, a restless cashier would eye each and every item you, the consumer, purchased and key it into the register. This took skill but also time—and proved to be an imperfect way to keep track of inventory. Then one day, a group of grocery executives and inventors came up with a better way: what we now know as the barcode, a rectangle that marks items ranging from insulin to Doritos. It’s so ubiquitous and long lived that
13 Readers on What Trump Voters Want
“What really matters is whether a candidate gives a voter an identity,” a reader argues.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I put this question to readers: “Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes,
Patricia Lockwood: At the Lighthouse With Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse, from the first word of its title, is a novel that moves. Here it comes striding across the lawn, with its hair in long, curving crimps and a deerstalker hat on its head, with a bag in one hand and a child trailing from the other. It is coming to find you, its face lights up, there is something in this world for you to do.
15 Readers on How They’re Cutting Costs
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers for their best tips on cutting costs in times of economic strain—and, looking back on their lives, what they might consider to have been their most wasteful spending.
Denise leads us off this week as
Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work
More than 20 years ago, as the rubble of the dot-com boom was still smoking, Wired magazine published an autopsy of the grocery-delivery start-up Webvan. The company had just filed for bankruptcy after evaporating the better part of a billion dollars of investment funds in about a year and a half, and the tale of its downfall opens with a sentence that, in retrospect, is pretty funny: “In the sober days of 2001, it’s hard to imagine a time when
Why Don’t Grocery Stores Stock the Most American Fruit?
By the time I arrived at Brooklyn’s Park Slope farmers’ market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. “You have to get here early,” Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market’s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan’s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery
How Bad Are Plastics for the Environment, Really?
This is hardly the time to talk about plastics is what I think when Dad, hovering over the waste bin at a post-funeral potluck, waves me over, his gesture discrete but emphatic. He has retrieved from the trash a crystalline plastic cup, with fluted, rigid sides. “Polystyrene,” he grins, inverting the cup to reveal its resin code (a 6 stamped inside the recycling symbol). “But not my kind.”
Dad, back in the 1960s, had manufactured a more resilient
How Unboxing Elaborate Packages Became an American Pastime
Of all the things I’ve purchased during the pandemic, the most useful has been a box cutter. Until last summer, I had put off buying one for more than 15 years, through no fewer than nine apartment moves’ worth of unpacking with dull scissors and countless struggles against shipping boxes bound by tape reinforced with tiny threads. This knife entered my life as a tool for some minor home repairs, but it’s scarcely exited
Influencers With Tourette’s Find a Niche on TikTok
Halfway through our conversation, Glen Cooney calls me a four-letter word often cited as the most offensive in the English language. But that’s okay. He doesn’t mean it.
Cooney has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes tics, twitches, and—in some people—a symptom called coprolalia, which the Tourette Association of America characterizes as “the involuntary outburst of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.” Living with the disorder is tiring, because of both the tics themselves and the effort of trying to
Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘The Richest Babysitter in the World,’ a Short Story
During the interview, I realized almost immediately that the woman was pregnant—I guessed she was about halfway along—but she didn’t remark on it, and of course neither did I. Over the phone, we’d discussed only her 3-year-old daughter. The woman, whose name was Diane, was looking for a babysitter for the girl, whose name was Sophie, two mornings a week from 9 a.m. to noon, for $10 an hour. This was in late January 1997, my senior year at