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Confessions of an Ableist
In the midst of all the rabbit-hole nonsense that comes with an election season, I was taken suddenly aback today when a Best Buy clerk offered me a plastic bag for my purchase for only 10 cents. “It will all go to charity,” he assured me with a straight face. Someone in that organization was paid real money to come up with this. I count it as California stupid, but any feral jurisdiction could be responsible.
Commercial transactions all have a drag coefficient. In stores, the floor staff should be visible and be helpful when needed and otherwise out of the way. Checkout lines should be short and efficient. And the rube that thought charging for the bags “for charity” should be shifted to duties more suitable to their talents. Restocking shelves might be too challenging. Maybe fit them for a broom.
Biden has shown us there are consequences for placing the disabled in positions of responsibility. If he were missing an arm or a leg or an eye, no problem. Instead, he is the babbling, mumbling, befuddled laughingstock of the world, although the thousands not properly evacuated from Afghanistan and still trickling out slowly are not laughing much.
Paper or plastic is a fair question. Ungraciously holding a bag ransom for a consumer purchase where gratitude is called for, just to turn around and “virtue signal” that the dime goes to charity, is amazingly in tune with the Biden-Harris-Fetterman disableist gestalt of the age, but it does not recommend Best Buy or the other icons of anti-Ableism as worthy of support.
If you’ll excuse me now, there are kids on my lawn.
Published in Culture
Great post! Your story reminds me of two intriguing incidents at our grocery store. First, Publix has some kind of campaign that reduces the cost of groceries. Of course, you need to give them all kinds of information including a copy of your birth certificate [kidding]. But I’ve been asked if I wanted to sign up a couple of times, and when I said I wasn’t interested, the clerk looked at me aghast: what was I thinking?! I ignored her. Also, recently a clerk mentioned that it was now okay to bring our original green bags instead of taking their plastic bags. So far I’ve been too lazy to dig out our old bags. Plus I’m annoyed. I’ll just keep wasting the plastic bags for now. Maybe the old rules will come in by the time I change my mind . . .
At most he should be a Wal-Mart greeter, although keep him away from the little girls. At best he should be home enjoying retirement and spinning yarns to tell the grandchildren (even the stripper’s kid he never remembers). Instead his tales could get us into a war.
Reach into your pocket, pull a few out, and tell him “some guy in the parking lot is hawking them two for a nickel.”
If you were to go into my garage, you would think I was a prepper who collected plastic bags. Whenever the collection gets to be a little much, I recycle them. I also have brown paper grocery bags.
We always used plastic shopping bags to put out our trash; they biodegrade in the trunk of the car, so I figure they’ll do the same in a landfill.
But now nowhere offers simple plastic shopping bags. We either have to put big and bulky multi-use bags in our trunk before shopping or else pay dollars for reusable ones at checkout, that is if they even have them for sale. And this makes spur of he moment shopping harder, which is half our shopping.
We now have no paper bags for wrapping packages, and no plastic bags for trash and we have to buy big, awkward and fragile garbage bags for our little bit of weekly trash pick-up.
Who did this? Whose idea has it been?
I tried lining the flower bed with plastic bags to keep weeds out. They didn’t last long.
From a “global warming” perspective, the best shopping bag is a plastic bag that goes into the landfill and sits there for a hundred years.
Biodegrading means releasing its carbon contents to the environment.
I see that my little corner of creation with its twisted Best Buy moments is heaven on earth compared to many. But at least there are still the kids on my lawn.
That is interesting because they were banned because they were supposedly nonbiodegradable.
What’s driving me nuts are the new biodegradable plastic bags for produce. Every time I try to use one of them, the produce goes right through it to the floor.
The government is making business so hard for retail brick-and-mortar stores and restaurants. People make impulse purchases when they are out and about and actually see things.
The government tells everyone to stay home while the retail stores and restaurants and entertainment venues need to get people out of their homes and into their physical establishments. And if the government’s telling everyone to stay home doesn’t work, why they just double the price of gas.
I commend the business world for dodging the bullets the government shoots at their feet every day. I would have gone nuts by now.
The science supporting plastic bag bans and everything like that is non-existent. It doesn’t net out.
Do you mean it’s just another act of mindless submission to feckless authorities, like ethanol in the gasoline? Imagine my surprise.
There were a bunch of good podcasts and articles about this years ago. Hygiene. Nobody is going to clean shopping bags enough. How long it takes a permanent bag to net out from using plastic bags from the manufacturing process. It’s literally like 20,000 or something. Of course you can reuse plastic bags at home.
I mean it’s a slam dunk.
It doesn’t get much publicity in this sense, but it’s definitely one of the dumbest policies ever invented.
God I love this.
ANALYIS: TRUE!
LOL
If you launder canvas shopping bags, that takes energy and I’m pretty sure soap uses fossil fuels and phosphates. Have you ever tried to use non-phosphate laundry soap? It sucks. I doubt it takes that many uses before the hygiene goes south. That’s the impression I got when I was researching this. It’s really an interesting subject, but I never see it anywhere anymore. It just has zero merit.
Another one like this is Styrofoam cups versus paper cups. Because of the manufacturing process, paper cups are way harder on the environment. It’s not even close.
Every time I walk around a grocery store, I shake my head: what product in here doesn’t have a container? To suddenly draw the line at the register and not allow the store to bundle and package their products however it works best for their customers is purely singling out one company or type of business.
I think what happened was that when we switched to landfills rather incinerating trash, the plastic bags started to fill with air, and on windy days, they’d blow around, sometimes landing in a tree. I think that’s what got the environmentalists’ attention. In the world we live in today, we need to keep our head down.
The same thing happened with the anti-lawn movement. The incredible growth in lawncare science has meant that people’s lawns have been looking fantastic for the last twenty years. The environmentalists noticed the pretty lawns, and now they are after the lawncare products and practices.
To succeed in modern America, it’s essential today to not attract anyone’s attention. Well, there’s a wonderful paradox. How do you sell your product without attracting attention? You can’t. Totalitarian governments crush their countries in a constant war of attrition. And the only colors they like are drab brown and gray.
The only way to save the planet is for all humans to die.
Leftist Keynesian inflationism has generated so much debt that the only way you can pay it off is with procreating more people for labor and more fossil fuels. The whole planet. These people are idiots.
What would they do if we actually made nuclear fusion work? lol
Leaving the question, who have you saved it for?
Exactly!
I read an old SF story in which the solar system’s uranium companies employed all the smart guys to invent fusion, and they perfected it three times, but the companies buried it because uranium sales were profitable and fusion wasn’t.
But of course no one would ever actually do anything like that. (Or have they?!)
Evolving minerals. Metamorphic rocks are the future.
The theory that no industry would chase a deflationary price spiral to the point of giving nigh infinitely more product for nigh infinitely lower prices is belied by the last eight decades of the computer industry.
People think that deflation means like dropping a bomb on a parking ramp and the thing starts pancaking. That’s what happened in the depression. It was started by too much money printing. Deflation is actually better living through better purchasing power. It’s just progress.
The other thing is, inflation makes it easier for bankers to lend. It’s safer because they don’t have to be that sharp on credit evaluation. People confuse this with the democratic expansion of credit. It’s as stupid as Soviet central planning. It just takes longer to collapse. Basically, you lever up, you buy a house or something to survive under inflation. It works for everybody except the poor bastards that time it wrong from the asset bubbles. etc. Then the whole thing tips over like it’s going to do in the next few years.
***this has been edited a lot***
Except that the computer industry isn’t selling the same old product but rather continuously new products that become more or less obsolete in a couple of years.
The world is getting more stupid. Get used to it and plan accordingly.
Today’s lawncare products happen to be tomorrow’s cancers.
BTW, lawns were very nice back in the 1950’s. Often all that was required was grass seed, water and occasionally reaching down and pulling out the crab grass.
Hrumpf. In Austin they outlawed plastic bags years ago and now charge a buck or two for “reusable” bags. It was a matter of personal honor to me that I never paid for a stupid bag. I just piled everything loose into my car.
I’m so glad every day that I don’t live in Austin anymore. It used to be so wonderful, now it’s a hell hole of “homeless” people pooping everywhere. It started with the banning of grocery bags.
In Athens (around the time of Phillip of Macedon), many people were afraid to wear a nice coat for fear that their taxes would go up. You can imagine that valuation of someone’s estate was not very sophisticated back then and if you splurged on a nice coat they might think you had more wealth than you did. Such is a drawback of nearly pure democracy.