Those Trader Joe's deliveries? Never mind
chicagobusiness.com
chicagobusiness.com
I know I have the unpopular view that services that do ride sharing are scary, as are many of the AirBNB's that are in random people's house.
And I know we don't do background checks on everyone who touches the produce... But we do require vaccines for people who touch our food in most places.
There isn't a nice way to say it, so I'll just say it. The Crowd that shops at Trader Joe's, or work at a service that is crowd sourced is more likely to be the crowd that doesn't get vaccinated.
Hepatitis being the most likely vector for something to go wrong which is why so many places require employees to have the HAV Vaccine.
EDIT: The comment about Trader Joe's Stems from an interview which is discussed here (making it easier to see the reference) http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2008/12/29/pandagon-anti_vaccinat...
Here is the interview: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r...
I can understand being concerned about such "crowd services" (although I personally use Airbnb and other such services regularly) but I don't see a basis or reason for that particular association between people who shop at a Trader Joes and people who don't get vaccinated.
And if you somehow have vaccination stats on the people who shop or work there, couldn't this be more likely due to the location where a Trader Joe's is situated in and, by extension, the particular demographics it caters to rather than the chain itself?
Edit: Parent's post didn't include any corroborating info at all. Looks like that was edited.
I mean sure we call them the "unwashed masses" but just because Jesus said we don't have to wash our hands any more in Mathew 15:11 doesn't mean that I'm bigoted against Christians because I want the guy who makes my food to wash his hands.
A lot of nice cars get vandalized in Hunter's Point, I don't want my nice car vandalize so I'm not going to park it in Hunter's Point. That doesn't say that everyone in HP is a vandal, just that more of them are than in say Santana Row.
Your food chain already includes a lot of handling, and indeed a lot of your food has at some point been in the dirt :o or covered in blood :o so I wouldn't lose sleep over that element.
Also this is the first I've heard about requiring vaccines for handling food "in most places"... is that really a thing?
[Edit] [Citation] http://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/Hepatitis-A.aspx
[Edit 2] Citation is only for Hep A which is less prevalent than those that require Hep B, or other Vaccines. Finding a single map of all the places that require a vaccine since some are city ordinances was too time consuming.
Hepatitis A transmission through food is rare. The biggest states in the US do not require hepatitis A vaccination for food handlers. Food handlers are also not on the CDC recommended list of people that receive said vaccine.
Source: I don't know, maybe because I'm a certified food safety manager in California (last I checked that state had like 10% of the US's population) and there are ten million other scarier things relating to food safety than hepatitis A transmission through food.
> 10 States that include the Largest Metro's also many cities mandate it through local health laws. > [Edit] [Citation] http://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and-diseases/Hepatitis-A.aspx
Haha this is cute.
The exact quote from the page is "By 2010, at least 10 states have mandated this vaccine for select groups of people, from food handlers to daycare attendees to kindergarten students." Nowhere does it say anything about "Largest Metro's" or cities that require this specifically for food handlers.
Last I checked through a cursory search, the top half dozen US states by population at least (which is roughly what? 1/2 the population of the US?) do not require a vaccine for food handlers, which is the context I'm looking for. I don't think I could give a damn if a state like North Dakota requires it when California considers ND's population to be a rounding error.
Agreed lots of things scarier than Hep A. But there isn't a vaccine for E. Coli or Salmonella.
Nice try.
You missed that your State is on the list and you didn't know it. I didn't know I needed to cite Every ordinance for every City... I'm sorry, I'll do better next time.
Phoenix (county, because city had nothing): http://www.maricopa.gov/publichealth/services/immunizations/...
Detroit: http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/Departmentof...
Chicago (county, cause city had nothing): http://www.cookcountypublichealth.org/faq
Yeah, I kind of can't find anything relating to a required hepatitis A vaccination for any of those cities. You'd think searching something like "x city food handler vaccine" would show you something other than post-exposure news stories if it was really required. I actually had to dig around for the public health department sites.
And nope I didn't miss my state. I can't be held accountable for like the one county in CA where my certification isn't accepted, but the rest of our lovely state really doesn't care that much for food workers specifically when it comes to that particular vaccination.
You, Sir or Madam, are a victim of bad science. Hell, I am one of those people who shops at TJ's because I live in San Francisco and it is excruciatingly expensive to shop at your neighborhood store that has hyper-inflated prices. I am also one of those people who is paranoid about getting all my vaccines; I grew up in Africa where I saw people die because they were too poor to afford a vaccine.
I also read the transcript of the american life article; there is simply nothing apart from anecdotes from these people about "the parents who don't vaccinate their children and also shop in WF/TJ". Show me a scientific observational study that shows that there is high correlation between every person who pays money in TJ/WF and their nature of being diseased, then we can talk!
"One of" is not all, but there is a bunch of people who do make up the "type" of people Trader Joe's targets who are Anti-Establishment, Anti-BigCompany, Anti-Pharma. Those are the people who are likely to opt out of Adult Vaccines.
First of all, grocery stores are pretty filthy places. Carts get used by thousands of people, and the most cleaning they generally get is when a customer grabs a sanitizing wipe at the entrance and wipes down the handlebar.
Supposing that Trader Joe's shoppers are significantly less likely to be vaccinated, which is worse: having someone unvaccinated pick up your groceries and deliver them, or going to an enclosed space full of unvaccinated people and pushing around an unsanitary cart for half an hour?
But point taken a shop in Half Moon Bay where there is no sun and lots of water is going to be pretty gross.
I don't know how many of the Apples are handled by other people in the store. And I know "3 second rule is a myth" but it there is the longer contact with one person, and that the one person is likely to interact with 100s of buyers makes the individual risk likely the same, but the resulting outcome 100x worse.
At the store one person might infect 2, but is unlikely to infect 200. A single delivery person could infect 200.
Haha wow, you are seriously overestimating the background checks and vaccination polices for individuals who work at grocery stores.
I wonder whether the difficulty with Trader Joe's stems from use of their name.
If I understand correctly, Trader Joes is using a rather flimsy trademark claim against Pirate Joes, but that claim could be made even more flimsy with better branding.
People in the big Canadian cities would line up around the block to be able to shop at a Trader Joe's. I know I would.
I found Trader Joe's to be a slightly less egregious Whole Foods, so I did most of my shopping there.
What finally wore me out was the fact that I couldn't do "all" of my grocery shopping there (I have no interest in buying hippy toilet paper or hippy soap), so I still had to shop at a "regular" grocery store.
Now, Amazon subscription takes care of most of our household stuff (like paper towels and dishwashing detergent and such), and we get produce delivered weekly by some local green grocer (which I let my girlfriend talk me in to, as left to my own devices I don't really eat produce).
TJ's succeeds by having, to first order, zero to one brand of everything: If they stock it at all, it's probably the TJ's brand (secretly rebadged from its original manufacturer). This isn't true for every category, but it is true for most.
This reduces many shopping decisions at TJ's to binary ones: Is the TJ version of X good enough? Or not? The bad news is that any given packaged product has a decent chance of being lousy. But you may only need to learn that once, because there's no other TJ's product in its category to confuse it with.
When TJ's is deemed good enough, your work is done. You do not need to decide between the deluxe and the basic version. You do not need to try and remember which brand reminds your wife of her childhood and which brand she thinks tastes "off". Your buying decision now fits comfortably in a single byte of memory.
When you stumble upon a TJ's product you actually like, you can always find it again. The shelves are relatively free of the usual booby-traps, like the "fat-free" flavorless versions of everything that masquerade as the regular versions, or the Curse of the 174 Premium Brands All Named After Somebody's Grandma that is the bane of Whole Foods shoppers who are trying to remember what they bought last month.
Having one brand of everything feeds viral loops. The word-of-mouth on TJ's brands is astonishing. The canonical example is their two-dollar wine. Some people can't tell the difference between two-buck-Chuck and vinegar, others can, but everybody knows which wine I'm talking about. I can send you out to buy a bottle ("this is a product you will never forget") and be confident you will come back from the store with the right thing, which is frankly more than I can say for any other bottle of wine in the world.
Half of TJ's products have their own cult. You bite into an appetizer at the party and exchange knowing glances with the host. Do you like what you're tasting? Does the label look like a TJ's label? You will be able to buy your own box tomorrow, with near-100% confidence.
It is true that if you don't eat packaged products there is little point in Trader Joe's; the produce is average At best, awful at worst. And if you've taken the time to develop actual taste in packaged products TJ's is also useless, because unless your favorite brand is the TJ's brand, your favorite brand is not there. My wife and I are buying less and less stuff at TJ's. But the one advantage that never goes away is efficiency. TJ's stores are pretty small. The shelves are easy to search, and the aisles shorter to traverse, because there are fewer brands of everything.
While the various choices at a normal grocery store have certainly caused us confusion on an occasion or two, I'm trying to remember the last time it did for us. Once you get into a routine over the months, particularly if one member does the bulk of the shopping, how hard is it to remember?
And we do like some variety. We switch things up a bit and try different brands/styles on occasion.
Oh well. Those types of things rarely appeal to me anyway.
Do you not have Whole Foods or some equivalent? WF has massively better produce, protein, dairy, cheese, bread, and wine/beer than TJ, and comparable staples.
A well-maintained Kroger or Safeway has massively better staples and significantly better produce and comparable protein and dairy; vs. Kroger, TJ's only wins at dairy, cheese, bread, and wine, and not really by much.
Source: Former Chicago native that purchased Safeway branded food at Dominick's.