Maybe it’s just easy to rip the tag off and stick a pair in your back pocket like they’re yours…? When I worked at a lumber plant I went through a pair of leather work gloves every two weeks or so, which would add up fast if you’re buying expensive ones (which I didn’t).
It is pre-added to baking mixes. Also, it is available in tiny paper envelopes as baking powder. But for the uses it commonly has in America, like cleaning or d-odorizing, you’d need to open about a hundred of those tiny papersacks. It just isn’t availble in jars.
How do bakeries buy it? (I’m imagining it must be the FNG’s job to sit there ripping open little packets by the 1000’s.)
“I’ll be clever! I’ll just nick it, and that way nobody will know except the police and the judiciary.” - Eddie Izzard
You know, I didn’t even think about having to explain the situation to a judge. “Well, I was really constipated and had bad dandruff, and I was planning on having sex that evening…”
They must be able to buy in in larger packages, of course. The stuff is legal and commercially available. It’s just that the stuff seems to be a household staple in the USA, sold in every supermarket in jars like flour or sugar, while it is unknown here as a general household item and only known as an addditive in baking mixes.
At the Tesco close to home they have frikkin’ chocolate bars in large plastic cases. And not particularly expensive ones. I have to say it’s been very effective at keeping me from buying them so far; I love chocolate, but I can’t be arsed to carry the jewelbox around and waiting for the cashier to paw it until it opens.
I noticed the last time that I bought glucose test strips, they were in a case that you had to turn a dial to dispense a single box. As others have noted, this is to cut down on theives just sweeping a shelf in one motion.
This is an improvement, though, they used to be kept in locked cases or behind the pharmacy counter.
Errr . . . I’ve never seen any of those sold in jars. Flour or sugar, bags or occasionally boxes. Baking soda, always boxes.
The U.S. has a tradition (don’t know if it is present in Continental Europe) of fairly popular “common sense household tips” newspaper columns and books (a famous example is Hints from Heloise, which gee I just realized she’s gone high tech and is online: http://www.heloise.com/). Anyhow, I seem to remember any number of hints for which the answer to some common household issue, or the way to get at a cheap workaround for expensive commercial products, was “use baking soda.” Off the top of my head, I know baking soda can be used for: brushing your teeth; deodorizing your refrigerator; relieving indigestion; and cleaning gunk off of car battery terminals. With all these ancillary non-baking uses (which used to be and for all I know still are printed on the boxes of the stuff), perhaps it’s not surprising that baking soda is widely stocked. Here are some additional apps. for which the manufacturer flogs it:
I would also say it’s because it’s expensive. It’s like $4.xx even at the Dollar General.