I ordered curb side pickup for 30 items, I really needed cat fud and a celery bunch. Soups salads sandwich fixings and other stuff filled out my order.
As the pickup time neared with no word from the store, I bundled up and warmed up the car for the ride into town.
All curbside spots were taken, highly unusual. Bad omens. Now I wanted to know will my order come out soon or should I cancel it and go inside and shop it myself. No one answering the phone in that department. Finally someone answers and he can’t promise nothing might be 10 min might be thirty. I press him further he says hang on. Okay 10 min tops. I wait. And wait wait okay 20 min later the app wants me to confirm substitutions. I made sure I chose backups for cat fud. But out of my choice and no substitutions were made. Also no celery made it on the bags.
So glad I dressed warmly and put on real shoes because I had to go schlep into the store to get fucking cat fud and celery which not one stalk on the shelf. Since when does the grocer run out of celery?
I found one overpriced tub of diced celery, I had to take it. And since I was in the store I spent $75 more.
And by that time it was dark and the wind and snows were cranking up.
I empathize, @purplehorseshoe. I have occasionally pulled a garbage or recycling bin out in vain because I’d either forgotten what day it was or forgotten about a holiday.
More often, though, I deliberately don’t bother sometimes because the bins are huge and can wait another week or two. In warmer weather I’ll take the garbage out promptly but in this weather all the stinky garbage is nicely refrigerated for free by Mother Nature.
The city distributed huge bins by default, which many homeowners like myself found didn’t fit in the garage. For a limited time they offered a free exchange for smaller ones. I’m glad I didn’t take them up on it – I just keep them outside and find the huge capacity practical.
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On a different topic, something I’ve been pondering over the last couple of days. On my last grocery shop, the checkout lines were busy so I used self-checkout. There was a store employee more or less monitoring the proceedings, but there was also another employee not involved in this who was heading back to the service desk. As she approached me she came close and looked directly into my eyes with a slight smile for a good few seconds, and then moved on. If I had been more quick-witted, I would have asked her, what the fuck? But I didn’t, and it’s a total mystery to me.
A couple years ago my small town decided to distribute rather large trash bins for our waste removal. I have never generated much trash and always easily dropped my little bag near the curb every Thursday night for Friday morning pick up.
Now I was faced with lugging this behemoth back and forth from my side porch to the street every week.
I did this for awhile but soon it became a burden to me physically so I just leave it out in the grass by the curb permanently as do a few of my other neighbors.
It looks a bit unsightly but there is no other option.
When I travel I often see similar size bins out in the streets and assume I must be passing by on garbage day.
I started to wonder if there was some kind of recent garbage bin law/regulation that was passed nationwide or perhaps even worldwide that created this explosion of uniform bin usage.
So far I have not found anything but I didn’t really explore too hard.
I suspect the households that produce huge amounts of trash far outweigh the minimalist trash producers, and ensuring everyone has a gargantuan bin makes for less crap blowing down the streets.
Where I live you can request different sizes of cans and it affects your bill. There are three of us and we generate a decent amount so we we the larger bins. We don’t always fill them but sometimes they are barely large enough and around the holidays sometimes I have to designate special bags to only put “non-stinky” waste in so that I can store them in the garage to wait a week or two. (As happened recently right after Christmas.) But we aren’t consistent every week.
I believe the change you are noticing is being driven by the garbage pickup services switching to the trucks that have the mechanical side-mounted arms that pick up the new bins and dump them into the truck. Those only need one person to operate thereby reducing the necessary crew from two or three to just one per truck. Fewer workers = more profit!
The revised forecast for Sun was 1-3" more in the afternoon. We got that 1-3" but over a course of 12 hrs instead of just the couple they were talking about. Iffn I had to do it over again, I’d be a meteorologist; where else can you be wrong 50% of the time & not get fired?
Anyway, I was late getting home because of said early snow & the roads being less than par so I threw a bunch of stuff in the car & off I went. Snowshoes made it but unfortunately, running shoes didn’t so instead of running in the big & not close park that I was driving past on my way home, I went home first & then had to run in the local park where I typically 'shoe because it was then too late to drive back to the big park. Unfortunately, I didn’t do anymore yesterday because I didn’t think the legs were up for a third day in a row; especially since Sat was my first run of the year after being sick. Plan B (which the weather is looking to make Plan A) for this weekend is a snowshoe race. Current forecast for race time — 9° with a feels like of -2°
Because it was snowing, I parked on the street & shoveled the driveway before putting a car on it; however, it was snowing pretty hard at that point such that I needed to reshovel the first part by the time I got to the end so I ended up leaving the car on the street…& not unloading all of my stuff that was in the car, including the (very) wet stuff - (we were in the canal doing ice rescue practice/training). BIG mistake! It evaporated in the sunny weather yesterday & once it got cold(er) I then had ice on the inside of my windshield.
No idea! Maybe panic buying, BOGO, delayed deliveries. Or they’re ready to reset and refresh the produce displays/shelving or a perfect storm of all the above.
Or a sign of things to come in amerika the divided.
Well that makes sense. It seemed odd that the changes appeared to occur almost at the same time everywhere.
I have seen my garbage workers reach in the bin and take out my little bag of garbage - I have yet to see them hoist it onto the truck as you describe!
In my experience it also means more mistakes. I can no longer take it for granted that all of the garbage will be empty after they come and I have to be very careful to judge how heavy each bag of garbage is and put the heavier ones on the bottom, something I never worried about for decades.
They also frequently leave the lids open when it’s raining and they fill up with water so I have to dump them out and let them dry before putting more garbage in them. They’re frankly just cutting corners in their service.
I too see signs of mysterious stock outages that I’d never seen before COVID. But things ought to have long since returned to normal from that shock. And generally have. But …
At groc stores around here in generic upper-middle suburbia it’s not like a certain product, e.g. TP, is always in short supply. It’s more like out of a store stocking WAG 10,000 distinct items, 5% of them are out of stock on any given day, whereas pre-COVID the number would’ve been 0.5%. Next week it’ll still be 5%, but a different 5%.
We were flying low over a neighborhood last month when I noticed a couple of large colorful squares outside the garage. Eventually realized they were the lids of the big trash & recycle bins, just seen from a different viewing angle.
