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from the well,-that's-certainly-different dept.
AlterNet reports
Forget plastic bag bans. Berlin is now home to a supermarket that's gotten rid [of all] disposable packaging. Original Unverpackt ("Original Unpackaged") [Google translation], which opened Saturday, is more of a shop, to be exact, but its 350-some products -- including from fruits, vegetables, dry grains and pourable liquids like yogurt, lotion and shampoo -- are dispensed into refillable containers. (Some liquids come in bottles with deposits on them, which is already standard in Germany).
The shop, backed by crowdfunding, is a creative experiment in a new kind of shopping, one that takes the ethics of stores like Whole Foods to a new level. It sells mostly organic products, each of which is labeled with its country of origin, and eschews brand names. Sara Wolf and Milena Glimbovski, the duo behind the project, were driven by the slogan[1] "Let's be real, try something impossible."
It remains to be seen if the store's scalable -- and whether it will catch on with the public. One "group of Germans" interviewed by NPR Berlin[2] complained that the store "looks too pretty and nice, and too bourgeois"; CityLab characterized such sentiments as reflecting a sense that "living a supposedly pared-down, less wasteful life is essentially a lifestyle hobby for people with enough spare cash to play at green dress-up." But while many of the products offered, perhaps because they're organic, tend to skew toward the pricier end of things, others are equivalent or cheaper than standard supermarket fare, one German newspaper reports [Google translation]. And a virtue of the fill-your-own-container model is that customers can purchase ingredients in exact amounts, meaning they don't have to overspend for food they don't need.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 22 2014, @12:49PM
There is an eternal wheel in business that rotates where everything old is new again. Its not just in IT technology or software development fads, its economy wide.
First example I can think of is I'm just barely old enough to have participated in the glass bottle return economy. So you'd buy an (8-pack?) of coca cola in glass bottles made with real sugar (this is before nationwide consumption of gallons of corn syrup per year was even a gleem in some ChemEng's eye) and you'd pay like a buck (I don't remember exactly) and then you'd drink it and return the empties in their cardboard carrier for about a quarter (and traditionally you'd buy a pack of filled bottles for a buck for a net 75 cents at all subsequent transactions). I don't remember the absolute amount of money but for a grade school kid we're talking about "some pocket change" for the entire transaction. The used glass bottles went thru the same sterilization process new bottles went thru. From memory I can't tell if the soft drink industry transitioned to corn syrup first or transitioned to plastic non-returnable bottles first, but it was almost the same time so it doesn't matter. Perhaps related somehow.
The next example I can think of is "bulk food" became a fad in lets say the very late 70s or early 80s. So you'd shovel sugar into a bag from a barrel with a scoup that some other kid probably licked and pawed all over. This is less unsanitary than you'd think in that during that rotation of the wheel, most of the stuff was pretty much naturally anti-bacterial anti-fungal anti-everything. Nothing can live in sugar crystals or pure undiluted honey or salt crystals. Flour is pushing the limit but with some care they didn't get bugs in it, somehow (pesticides?) Sounds like this turn of the wheel has crazy ideas like raw chicken, so good luck with that. Self serve bulk food died out for a few decades but its back at the health food stores today. Non-self serve never died out and we call it a "deli" in a supermarket and you can ask someone to repack any mass you'd desire of bulk packed potatoe salad into little plastic tubs for you. None of it made on site of course and none of it fresh (I worked in a supermarket as a kid, I know these things). I never understood how it worked economically to pay a dude minimum wage to pack by hand vs a centralized operation with machines doing the packing. Sometimes supermarkets are weird. At least this makes sense with the meat department where all cuts of meat are not exactly identical.