Wasting Waste

Have you ever just paused to take notice of just how much STUFF is in stores? It's staggering. Staggering. I don't really wander into very many stores very often. I don't buy a lot of clothing right now, and when I do, it's usually in my favorite thrift stores. My husband handles a lot of the grocery shopping... So the rare time I get to a "big-box" or whatever you call them store, it's like culture-shock all over again, every time.

That stuff all has expiration dates. Think about it.

There is more stuff in most stores than can possibly be bought. What happens when it all expires? It gets thrown out. It's not like last year's out-of-fashion fashions; this stuff goes bad. It doesn't get sent to the needy, it doesn't go to feed some third-world country... it just gets tossed.

I would rather see grocery stores run out of things than throw so much away. I mean, sure, you see them run out of stuff in emergency situations, like major snow storms - oh, wait, we didn't have many of those this past winter, did we? There's no such thing as climate change - and the battle hymn of "Bread-and-milk-bread-and-milk" - because, yeah, when was the last time you were snowed in so long in most civilized areas that you were in danger of starving because you were out of bread and milk? That always ALWAYS made me crazy. Headline: "Family of 5 Runs Out of Bread and Milk, Found Starved to Death After Roads Were Cleared One Day After 6-Inch Snowfall." Yeah. That doesn't happen. (Wow, that was a bit of a brain barf just then... thanks for being there for it.)

Yet, what would shelves emptied of product say? That the store was poorly run? Bad stocking, and you won't go there again? If a store runs out of something you want, you leave and go somewhere else and never go back to that one again. So they better stock up, even if it means wasting stuff, because gods forbid we can't have absolutely everything we want at our fingertips at every second of every day. What has happened to us? What is it that we value? Would we value things more if we ran out of stuff once in awhile? Or is it the ruin of modern civilization to think a store would run out of anything?

I'm stymied. I got nuthin'. This one isn't going to go away any time soon. We need to overhaul our whole way of thinking. I feel another blog coming up for this one... it's too big.

And that's our problem. Too big. Everything. It's all too big, too much...

Hm.