And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....
and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.
It's smarter in every single point: - I buy what I need instead of what was decided by the packager. - I don't buy a package to throw it away and buy a new one next time. What a waste of money on top of the environmental impact. - It's way more efficient for shopping. When things are organised in bulk it's visually much easier to spot in comparison with packaged stuff with random designs in aisles. - Never experience "queues at stations" so this is a non problem in my 2 decades experiences of shopping in bulk in various cities/countries
Compared to narrow aisles and decision paralysis from 60 different plastic bottles with the same ingredients but different scents/dyes, I think any inefficiencies in bulk shopping are probably pretty small.
Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.
And yeah, I actually do go with the "line up at the beer station and get bulk beer", a number of breweries around me have walk-up growler filling stations. It is pretty nice getting fresh beer straight from the source. A few groceries near me fill growlers as well.
It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain ourselves in 30 years time to our grandchildren?
“Yea I know sweety we messed up your planet. But I’ll be dead in 5 years and in the mean time it was really convenient. Sucks to be you”
https://www.packaging-gateway.com/comment/tylenol-murders-fo...
There are psychos all over America. Wanton violence and anti-social behaviour are cultural norm. You can get shot because someone else looked at another person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Kansas_City_parade_shoo...
We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduct. Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.
Source on this?
1 minute for each product, vs like 1 second for each product. I think it's a similar efficiency loss as containerized vs break bulk shipping.