A man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
And then a meat truck once a week and a fish truck more irregularly.
Took requests as well.
I think of it like villages having Amazon Prime starting in the late 90s.
I would have thought Croatia to be small enough to not need such a system; i.e. supermarkets not further than half an hour drive away.
Or is it just a matter of convenience?
It's likely that one could drive for 30 minutes and find an even better selection. That assumes car ownership and the ability to drive, which is not widespread in the aging population in rural areas.
The bakery guy would have a promotion every week with something new for you to try, but apart from that you didn't have to make any decisions. I find choosing between 20 almost identical flavors of sandwich bread in your average supermarket to be much more mentally exhausting.
And since you knew which weekly special everyone else was trying out these days, you had a shared easy conversation topic with anyone.
Plus, to my big surprise the quality of frozen fish and vegetable packs was impeccable. Now, years later, I know that pretty much all "fresh" fish that you see in a supermarket is frozen for transport. So there's no difference.
I still think about the UK. I cannot imagine anywhere in the UK being more than an hour or two from anywhere else.
It's smaller in land mass than 10 US states, coming in just behind Oregon and just ahead of Idaho.
A couple friends and I took an overnight trip to Busan. We were having lunch at a small restaurant, and my friend asks the staff if she can order takeout and have it sent back to her home in Seoul. Mind you Busan to Seoul is 325km.
This was mind-boggling to me. I asked her, “How long is that gonna take to get there?!” She was puzzled, looked at me and said, “It’ll be there later tonight.” She then laughed and continued, “Hey, this is Korea!”
The delivery network of small highly developed countries is simply amazing.
Still, impressive nonetheless.
It was expensive of course since it was the fastest way to move stuff (trains are faster than cars), but I imagine that at cost it would be cheap enough for takeout.
https://www.bahn.de/p/view/angebot/zusatzticket/ic_kurier.sh...
Delivery can also be done to Paris, Vienna, Basel and Amsterdam along with the ICE trains travelling there.
Prices I'm shown ~0,22 EUR/km, 33€ to and from the station each and a surcharge of 33€ for night or holiday transport, so ~300€ for crossing the country, and it takes less than a day. Maybe there are rich people out there paying that much for takeout?
A few moments with Google maps and I found two places in Scotland that are ~23 hours apart by car. :-) And Scotland is only a small part of the UK.
I was contemplating a post-lockdown trip to Shetland and was looking at the ferry times to Papa Stour which made me think of this!
NB 14.5 hours to get to Lerwick from where I live in Scotland and a couple of hours to get from Lerwick to Papa Stour.
They probably had a train connection link somewhere that went to/from a big city and that’s how it all worked.
They had milk and pork, but generally sold/traded that for everything else they needed: oil, salt, sugar, etc. And of course some monetary savings for their escape!
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/John+o'+Groats/Lands+end,+Pe...
The southwest most point and the northmost point are tourist attractions. The eastmost point is a small marker in an industrial estate next to the gasworks in Lowestoft.
The Scottish Highlands are generally not very accessible and you'll often be charged extra postage by Ebay vendors. There's a single good road that runs north from Edinburgh. Beyond that it's twisty little single track roads on which it's difficult to make good speed safely without risking hitting a sheep round a blind corner.
There are a lot of single track roads - but there are also a lot of perfectly decent A class roads linking the main areas.
NB By single track I mean single track with passing places:
That's very relative. With 72 ppl/km^2, I wouldn't call Croatia "sparsely populated".
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...
I hate how North American farmer markets in big cities are turning hipster and expensive unless you’re really careful. Direct from the farmer is supposed to be cheaper!
Anyway, think of it differently, instead of a need, why not a want? It's not that different from having groceries delivered to your home. Maybe not as scalable, but it's a valid buisiness model, especially in rural areas.
Nowadays I think it's becoming more of a need again; with the migration of people out of the small towns, more and more grocery stores have decided to pack it up because they just don't get enough customers anymore. A mobile shop that frequents multiple towns every week is a valid replacements.
And as another commenter mentioned, it's not limited to just groceries; we also had a fishmonger, and everyone remembers the ice cream truck. I don't see why hipster food trucks don't actually truck around either.
A more recent example, an ice cream truck would park out front of office buildings and ring its bell. A tiny coffee trike would park in the train station in the morning, then do the rounds at the office buildings nearby throughout the day. The important thing with those services is that they consistently appear on the same day and roughly hour, and that they have some kind of audio cue.
A lot of rural Europe has laughably poor mountain infrastructure - dirt roads, often badly damaged, are sometimes the only way in or out of a village, and when it rains, the guy with the 4X4 truck is your only ticket in or out.
I’ve lived in rural wales, three miles up a paved but steep and narrow lane - if you meet someone, you’re looking at ten minutes of reversing on a bad day - no passing places. I’ve been stuck in the middle of two opposing convoys and one person refusing to back up, and it’s just... well, it makes you not want to go out. Sometimes, someone gets a motorhome stuck on the bridge, and the village is cut off for a day or more. The nearest store is 30 minutes drive away, if the road is clear and the bridge is open.
I’ve lived in rural Bosnia, in a village that you can only reach by a track that looks and drives worse than most river beds. It’s only 15km or so from Sarajevo, but it takes nearly 90 minutes to get there, and there’s little inbetween.
Here in Portugal, a 15km line of sight is a 60km drive - it’s a mountainous region, and again, most of the roads are dirt, single track. The nearest village with a shop to me is 4km away by drone - 28km by road - two rivers in deep valleys between here and there, and only so many medieval bridges are passable by car. The nearest modern bridge is so far off it may as well be in Spain - oh wait, it is!
For someone like me (young, strong, hands on) getting around is a pain in the ass. I never know which journey is going to turn into grappling with straps and jacks in mud. For someone elderly, going out is a daunting prospect. What if I don’t get home? What if I get stuck? What if I break down and nobody passes for two days?
The importance of these services can’t be underestimated - I don’t think these places could continue to exist without them - their population is too low to support permanent stores.
May I ask: Is this work-related that you live country-side in so many different places, or are you a restless soul? :)
As to how we choose - we do a lot of overland travel, and see a lot of places as a result. We’ll get to know a local in some forsaken spot who’ll be like “that cottage is for sale for cheap, it needs a lot of work”, or “the goatherd’s daughter has gone to university and he’s going to struggle this winter” or “there’s an old mill down by the river that only an idiot would buy”, and we just kinda do it. That’s all been in the three and a bit years since I stopped giving a damn and just decided to do whatever - I’m lucky in having a spouse who was willing to trust me when I suggested we both quit our jobs, stop being director of this and manager of that and just go be humans of earth. Before work got silly, we, and before that I, used to go wandering periodically - usually somewhere where people would stop and stare at the outsider - had a great time in the ‘stans, both times, and Siberia - and did a tour of all the bits of Latin America nobody visits - love the interior of Uruguay. Nearly settled down there, but only stayed two months, as I can see economic and environmental doom just around the corner for them.
Anyway. I digress. I’ve always had itchy feet, and I probably should have been an anthropologist or something.
The impending doom - environmentally, they’ve problems. Tainted aquifers, severe topsoil erosion bordering on desertification from overgrazing, vast eucalyptus monocultures. Economically - they have a final salary pension scheme that everybody scams (e.g. we’ll pay you 30% of your normal wage for your last three years before retirement and then 400% for your final year), and a huge black market with Brazil - people smuggle everything from toilet paper to cars, and it’s universal and normal. They are resorting to foreign agribusiness investments to bridge their deficit, and that only worsens the environmental degradation. Mercosur could go a long way to solving Uruguay’s woes, but it suits the bigger players better to keep Uruguay on a tight leash.
I really recommend the interior - Salto, Carmelo, Fray Bentos, Tacuarembo (Patria Gaucha festival was kinda fascinating - all the gauchos and their families ride in from all over for a week of rodeo and country activities - it’s very much for them, not tourists, so you’d better like steak, beer, and watching people get kicked in the face by horses), Paysandu - charming little cities with lots to explore around them. We loved San Gregorio do Polanco - sleepy little town smack in the middle of Uruguay on a huge reservoir, covered with art, all slightly offbeat, beaches and swimming when there’s water, galloping bareback across the dried up lakebed, startling flamingos, when there’s not.
Coast-side, Punta del Diablo is a cute little beach town, but as you near Montevideo it just slowly gets more built up and crappy, until you reach Punta del Este, which is a sort of micro-Miami.
Montevideo itself is great, interesting, cosmopolitan city, and generally really safe - but it’s a mistake to treat it as representative of Uruguay as a whole.
I'll need to brush back up on my Spanish, but hope to go over the next few years.
Iceland has quite a few villages (like 3-4 buildings in size) that are connected by compounded earth roads rather than paved ones.
Either there's some economic situation preventing similar transportation solutions working in Europe or the people who say that Europe has great transit options have a lot of explaining to do (frankly I think it's a little of both).
For the most part, American towns are built next to the roads. If there's not a road, there's not a town. (Alaska is a notable exception.) In Europe, said roads and towns often long predate SUVs and wouldn't be passably in such.
Also a number of the countries being mentioned are relatively poor. The GDP per capita of the US is more than 10 times the GDP per capita of Bosnia (and close to 3x that of Portugal). That obviously has an influence on the affordability of vehicles and the quality of infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow-gauge_railways_in_Bosni...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUiA1zP3tU4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4AYnl2TVKg&list=PL_YB4oZW18...
I get why it works that way, but I was bemused nonetheless.
> As the store grew, Parker and his father launched their own freight company, purchased the town’s gasoline station, and bought two of their own ships — a $300k “insurance policy” that gave Parker tighter control over the supply chain in case of an emergency.
I feel like they left out a step between $3k and a frieght company with 2 ships.
(Can't help but remember Grim Fandango, where a similar transition between a small-time sales agent and a ship owner is made by writing "one year later" across the screen.)
Same goes for trucks, you can buy a brand new F-150 crew cab for $35,000 with all the fixings, or you can buy a 5-ton truck military surplus that can tow ten pickup trucks for $8,000.
The only explanations I can see are: 1) People are still panic-buying flour even after they've settled down about toilet paper, 2) everyone is secretly gorging themselves on bread, 3) the supply has dried up, or 4) there's some vast and growing stockpile of unsold bread flour in the wholesale supply chain. None of these explanations ring true to me, so where's the flour going?
Also, try making sourdough. Have to make the starter first, but after that you're set.
Or get yeast from other sources, like dried fruit and such. Yeast is everywhere!
They end up baking one loaf and then just forgetting about it in the pantry, but they bought a 20 lb bag because of how much they expected to bake.
I normally go through a 5kg bag of flour every month or two, just baking some breads and cakes occasionally. So far, I've gone through almost 20kg of flour in 6 weeks. And I know many others who are baking much more than usual
That said, mine is mostly a couple loaves of bread every 3 days substituting a couple bread products from the grocery store every 2 or 3 days. So not causing extra demand for the ingredient, just a different format (i get my flour by the 5 to 10kg bag, the grocery store that normally does my baking likely gets theirs in ...slightly larger volumes)
My guess is that more production is for the 20lb bags, and the 2lb bags usually sat on the shelf longer.
My wife bought a 50lb bag today: our local bakery buys that size for their own purposes. It's a good sized sack.
I do not think there are many people out buying 20lb bags of flour.
We got both at our local Walmart.
Costco is the exception here (their entire business model is to buy things wholesale, from the business supply chain). Most grocery stores can't stock 12.5kg bags of flour because they don't have enough space on their shelves, not to mention that in their view most consumers would be put off by a lack of choice (even if it means that products are in stock).
And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.
PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.
Centralized production...
And source control to keep initial mold spore counts low.
If the majority of bread-eaters have pivoted to baking it at home, total bread consumption has very likely increased.
Because the commercial bakery wants the flour in a 100 lb bag, but the retail store needs 100 1 lb bags. And the commercial packaging lines can't easily swap to packing their product into 1 lb bags.
And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.
I generally aim for clear and casual communication and it seems like I messed up somewhere.
The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available.
Huh? It’s very common for larger supermarkets to have their own bakeries (even in small cities) in the US. I get fresh bread at the Safeway in my city...
If your first two or three attempts a baking bread fail, then you end up becoming one of those people with 85% of a 20lb bag of flour in the cupboard waiting for the weevils to move in...
(The temp calibration on my oven is way out. Doesn't matter too much for roasting chickens or cooking lasagne, but baking is more temperamental than that, and way too easy to fuck up. Luckily I only bought a 1kg bag of flour to fail hard with...)
Have you checked if your air vents are blocked? Ovens don't have adjustable fires, they are always on/off.
I can't think of any kind of failure that would cause unusually high swings.
Wheat flour's talents tend towards baking because of its high gluten content, so in a sense it's "wasted" on porridge. But if your oven isn't working it's less of a waste than literally throwing it away!
Hatch. If you get weevils, they were already there just waiting to hatch.
One thing I've done is found a local restaurant supply store and had a friend with a business tax ID add me to their account (account is setup to actually charge sales tax so it's all good there). At these places, very little is in shortage - plenty of flour to be had of all types they typically stock. The only shortages I've noticed have been in chicken at the moment, and of course PPE. Everything else seems quite well stocked for the time being.
The downside of course is that when you want to buy some chicken thighs, your minimum order qty is 40lbs. But I started a co-op buying group with my friends in the neighborhood and just spend some time splitting things up into usable quantities.
It's come in handy for stuff that is hard to come buy in the grocery stores or costco like chocolate chips. Of course, the minimum qty of those is 25lbs so we had to divy quite a few up! The cost savings are absolutely astronomical on a per-unit basis for most staple items.
I've also noticed at least at my local costco they have started to get "alternative" sources redirected from the commercial supply chain. Such as 50lb bags of rice in plane white nylon bags with a sticker slapped on it. This seems to support the theory that packaging (both material and labor) is the bottleneck for retail staple goods.
Add in all the waste of every 23 year old who has never baked in their life buying 20lbs of flour to go bad in their pantry and things.
How quickly does processed flour go bad? I’d imagine as long as you store in a dry, air-tight box, it should be ok?
Also, I hear kids these days occasionally use the Internets to learn how to do things.
But even if you open them all and let them sit on a counter, you get at least several months out of them unless you get insects in there. And if that happens, trust me, you've learned a life-long lesson.
Unless you have moths or bread beetles.
Yep. I own a bakery. My big-name ingredient supplier doesn't carry the flour brands commonly seen in supermarkets, and the same is true in reverse. Likewise, the flour I buy doesn't include the labeling seen with retail products, like a nutritional panel. If I want the detailed information a manufacturer offers I request that from my supplier or the manufacturer. As an example, I was looking into a new source for one ingredient recently (malted barley flour), and the sales representative also gave me all the secondary documents (total of 70 pages):
Food Safety Audit Report
Certificate of Conformity
Material Safety Data Sheet
Certificate of Analysis
Kosher Certification
Technical Data Sheet
Corporate Certificate of Liability Insurance
Product Guarantee
Product Specifications Sheet
If there are particular foods for which you'd like this information, I would check company websites and then reach out to producers if that isn't getting the information you want. I can't say how forthcoming companies are with this documentation. Keep in mind trade secrets could be involved that might be violated just by providing that level of specificity.
I got this excuse when I wanted to know if “natural ingredients” included cinnamon in the cinnamon spread I bought once.
After stating that I had a cinnamon allergy, they confirmed to me that it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game
I'm guessing the retail supply chain and their wholesalers are a pretty much seperate business and supply chain to the restaurant industry, and a jump in demand for home baking (even if that's probably mostly just going onto household pantry storage) has pushed the traditional supply chain into instability.
Pretty much the same story for toilet paper too. It's not like people need to wipe their arses more in isolation, but the retail market and the business/workspace market supply chains are now flailing around looking for a new barely stable ordering/stocking equilibrium.
So I have friends that are reasonably known restaurateurs who obviously shut down their restaurants. I was talking to them about the logistics and the issues with the supply chain. It was rather eye opening to me.
TL;DR : the problem with the supply chain is that the restaurants pay more for ingredients wholesale than what the public is willing to pay retail.
We do not have a product shortages -- we have excessive amount of perishable product that was offloaded at excessive markup to restaurants/cafeterias/schools/etc. I'm in NYC - I can still walk into a regular grocery store in Queens/Brooklyn ( non Whole Foods ) and get chicken quarters from Perdue for $0.59-$0.89/lb. I can get a tomahawk steak for $14.95/lb (the chefs were shocked), a whole salmon (whole) imported from Canada, received today for $6.95/lb. I can get 10 lb onions for $4.95. Leg of lamb (whole) is $4.99/lb
Restaurants pay 20-30% more than these prices as the baseline to Baldor or Sysco. I guess that 20-30% slippage does not matter for the restaurant when it is charging 4x-5x of the raw cost per plate.
His answer was:
* we charge $20 for a plate that costs is $4 in ingredients because we are lazy to squeeze it down to $3.50.
* Single sourcing means I don't have to trust ten of my employees with credit cards to run around the city to get stuff.
* Single delivery means I can schedule it better.
Here are some things I've gotten from https://www.baldorfood.com/ in the past few weeks, including delivery:
* Bread flour at $0.46/lb
* Yeast at $4.96/lb
* Vanilla extract at $2.55/oz
* Cherry tomatoes at $1.42/pt
* Onions at $0.90/lb
* Honeycrisp apples at $1.05/lb
* Baby spinach at $4.38/lb
These are all as good or better than the Market Basket (local cheap grocery store) price, and the quality is higher. There are also many products that are fancier and more expensive than they would be at Market Basket, but I can just not buy those.
* Cherry tomatoes when available: $1.00/pt
* Tomatoes: $0.99-$1.50/lb, right now up to $1.69lb
* Onions: $0.59/lb
* Honey crisps: $4.99/bag ( 5lb per bag )
* Baby spinach: $2.49/lb
So the mass consumed vegetables are are about 2x the price of a local super market and they have $250 min. Try meats and fish and you see the similar level of markup.
I think their business model is to provide single point logistics services covering ingredients to companies that take those raw ingredients and do value add ( restaurants ) and selling on credit. That model does not work if there are no buyers for the logistics service.
I think should they be delivering to consumers, their competitor is instacart where the basked ends up being 20-80% higher than the same basked would be should it be filled directly in a supermarket. ( counting all the fees )
(They also are delivering to consumers; we've been putting in a weekly order and it's a way better experience than Instacart.)
>The prices you're listing are also lower than what I see in the cheap grocery stores here, not sure why?
No idea. I don't even remember the last time I got onions for over $0.55/lb.
> hey also are delivering to consumers; we've been putting in a weekly order and it's a way better experience than Instacart.
That's because very few consumers are getting this delivery though I'm with you, they are definitely competing with instacart.
As for the supply of meat, expect that to change. In upstate NY most cuts of beef are gone and trimmed chicken is either not in stock or sold before noon.
Joking aside, we did give her an iMac, but you can’t find yeast anywhere.
If you look at a family of four you could have gone from two working parents with both children in school to one or both parents at home along with both children. They may not have had much time for baking before. Baking is a useful task since it provides food and can occupy the children if you get them involved. A batch of cookies and some bread or buns every week will substantially increase a household's flour use.
This is partially offset by less commercial baking. However, commercial bakeries buy huge packages of flour and not the smaller bags available in grocery stores. The supply chain needs time to transition to this change in demand.
I grew up around there and bagged astoundingly large grocery orders for people coming in from the villages to shop. I also stayed in Gustavus at family friends homes, and even grew up with a kid named after the town. It's weird that I am reading this story from SF now. Just wanted to show up and rep the hometown/s.
I thought it was a gripping read. Neither title really does it justice. I have submitted it to r/CitizenPlanners because this one store is playing such a critical role to the welfare of the entire community and does so even under "normal" conditions. And these are not remotely normal conditions.
It's extremely common to zip down to Juneau to go shopping and then hop back to the Yukon. It's just a 10 hour one way trip, and when you live in the North that's not so far. Tons of people go there simply to go to Costco (which doesn't exist in the Yukon)
It's also really nice to go in winter when it's -40C/F in the Yukon (all inland) and usually right around freezing in Juneau (coastal)
Spoken like a true Canadian. (Edit: Oops!)
The Yukon is in Canada.
If not, it's probably from Costco US. Otherwise it's from Costco Canada.
What is interesting is how similar the extremes are. In the middle of nowhere, the cost of the product is dominated by shipping. In the center of modern society, the cost is dominated by rent. It's only when you go out to the suburbs, probably one of society's least efficient constructions, that you see the lowest prices -- a perfect balance of efficiency, I guess. It is weird and I wonder if there's some lesson in here.
I suspect the inefficiencies are just externalized! Rent is low because land is cheap(er) in suburbia, but society pays in increased average travel times* as well as the high costs of road infrastructure needed to support suburban living in general, which is paid for in our taxes and thus doesn't show up on the price tag at the store but rather as a line item on our paychecks.
* I can walk less than five minutes to the grocery store in the urban core. Admittedly I have no data on this but based on my own experience, I'd bet it takes the average suburban household at least 10 minutes to drive to a grocery store - and 20-30 minutes to drive to a Costco-like store, placed where rent is even lower - and then 2-3 minutes on average spent looking for parking and then walking across the parking lot! Time is money, and given society's obsession with optimizing time, I find it strange how little attention we truly pay to travel times.
Not for the truckers delivering the goods.
[1] https://fstoppers.com/food/what-week-groceries-looks-around-...
IIRC it's a known phenomenon, but I can't remember the name right now. Buyers overestimate the demand, then the next cycle they have stock left, then again buy double because the shop might not have the thing next time. So the demand keeps swinging thereafter.
In fact, the dude is sorta lucky since he can just ask everyone what they want, no need to guess from jumping numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect is the article specifically about the fluctuations.
Come to think of it, apparently in the case of the Alaskan dude just one level of interaction is enough to summon the effect with 100% variation. I wonder what the Costco managers think of the picture on their end and whether they in turn order even more reserves.
In some village in Papua, Indonesia, the logistics are supplied by small plane that visit regularly. The road infrastructure there is still bad, especially in the mountainous part of the island. And even if there are roads, it's safer to go by plane.
Some small islands got their logistics by ship either once a week or once a month. And it really affected by the weather.
Being an island country puts a challenging problem for Indonesia to distribute logistic to its people.
But sometimes you wonder, some places just seem to not be suited for people to live self-sustainably in, because of location, population density, transportation networks. Maybe $12 milk is one of those signals.
Hauling a trailer vs trucking in, storing, and managing stock. Seems like a smart move to keep overhead low.
>>One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2%
Do Americans call 2% whole milk? Around here full is 3.2% or even 3.8% of fat content