That's actually how a lot of businesses in rural parts of Alaska work, even places that don't require a boat or plane to access. My dad lives right off the highway in a small town in Alaska, and the closest thing to a grocery store is an old airplane hanger that one of the locals runs a general store out of. The owner makes weekly trips to Costco, which is ~4 hours away, and buys as much as they can fit into a big U-Haul, then resells it at their store. The selection is pretty limited, but they take requests throughout the week and will try to fulfill them on the next trip.
Rural Croatia too, except it’s a truck that comes to all of the villages 3x/week with staple items. Plays ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music through a loudspeaker to announce his arrival.
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.
It’s the same here in rural Portugal. However, if you just go to the van and ask for some bread (for example), they look at you as though you’re mad. After all, you didn’t order it yesterday, therefore why on earth would they have bread for you today?!
I get why it works that way, but I was bemused nonetheless.
Here in Maryland, there are trucks from New York Chinatown stop at local park and ride regularly to deliver specialty Chinese food. You order through an app.
Rural Italy also has the fish truck that comes 2X/week. They'll stop by pre-determined spaces for scheduled times so those who want fish know to be there at the scheduled time.
Small, but the transport network isn’t necessarily reliable. Mountains are a big obstacle. Croatia, like most of the balkans, is really mountainous. When it’s not mountains it’s islands. Nightmare for transport infrastructure development.
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.
The sad part is, Bosnia once had an incredibly dense narrow gauge railway network throughout the country and region but it deminished and closed down starting in the 1960ies.
Sample bias - I’ve lived in my fair share of big cities around the planet - but over the last few years, after burning out from chronic stress after a decade of building my business, I’ve made a focus of examining slower ways of living, closer to nature - I still do tech consulting, and off grid living suits my skillset handily.
These days, trying to stay put - been here about eight months and have no particular plans to move on.
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 liking it, or the impending doom? I liked it as it’s down to earth and relaxed, the people are kind, and it has a lot going on in and around arts and culture, all over the place.
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.
Poor people in similarly remote (similar travel distances but less circuitous routes) parts of the US and Canada with manage to get to Walamrt and back about once a week in run of the mill 20yo SUVs.
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.
It probably saves a ton of time not having to make that run yourself. Also, often just because something isn't common doesn't mean it isn't possible or doesn't happy; it just means that cultural norms swing one way or another. I'd bet the fish truck is ower-operated (even if the owner is a co-op), for instance, which probably has roots in how things were done for a long time.
With a tank of propane and a week’s shopping? Yes, bikes get you around just great, but a load of cargo, not so much. Here in Portugal, the Toyota Hilux is the standard vehicle - usually 80’s or early 90’s.
A very similar system is also common in small towns (population in the low hundreds or fewer) in Spain. Every few days a baker will come driving their van and selling bread, or a truck with fruit, etc. Even doctors and priests follow a similar pattern.
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.
I used to work in a very small village in France. The bakery from the nearby city would bring a van full of bread to the campsite near the town, the reception would function as a 'depot de pain' for both tourists and villagers.
Now they even accept request by WhatsApp. You can go to the nearest big town, but it’s much more convenient when they bring it to your door, and a van can serve 10-15 small towns each day.
On the contrary. When I lived in such a village on vacation, it was incredibly liberating.
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.
Twenty odd years ago, we had a system like that though, despite there being multiple grocery stores in walking distance. Some people have mobility issues meaning they can't walk / cycle to the shop, but a grocery store on wheels is fine. It was called the SRV Wagen, which stood for "sell rationally together" when the scheme was started in the 70's. There are still 100 of these vans active last year apparently.
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.
Many people don't own a car because they can't afford it or are too old to drive it. Owning a (registered) car costs with gas yearly about 1 net monthly salary. Croatia is small but even so very sparsely populated. 1/4 of population is in the capital metro area
Looking at nationwide statistics can be misleading, often you'll find that while on average you get a figure like that, almost all of it is centred on a few large cities with anything outside those cities consisting of scattered small villages a few hundred people living in them.
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.
Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea
The food was already sealed and safe for travel. Can't recall clearly, but I think it was some dried fish or sausage dish. So it was just a manner of getting it delivered. She ordered a lot and didn't want the hassle of us lugging it with us during the remainder of our day.
The German Railway used to deliver packages with the regular high speed rail system. You bring it to the train, it gets put in a cargo room, and you arrange for someone to pick it up at the destination station.
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.
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?
What you're not taking into the account is the standard of living though. This is totally how some rural communities in Poland worked not that long ago, and you could also say "but hey, Poland is fairly compact, you could drive from the village X to a larger city which has stores in like 30 minutes, what's the deal?", forgetting that for a long time the only vehicle in a village might have been an agricultural tractor, a lot of "daily business" travelling was still done with a horse and a cart. Besides, those rural communities had staples produced locally - my auntie always had a cellar filled to the brim with potatoes, milk from a cow, eggs from chickens, they'd butcher a pig from time to time so a freezer was usually full of meat, local bakery would get a delivery of flour from elsewhere. It's just that "hopping over to a town nearby for shopping" wasn't really an option until mid-90s at least, when the market got absolutely flooded with cheap cars and people found the ability to afford them.
I asked my mom if/where they got yeast in the 50s and 60s, and she said that once a week, a lady would arrive on horse/donkey and trade everyone for their eggs.
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!
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 still a few places in Scotland which operate on such a system (I spent a bunch of time in one of them growing up and still go there at least once a year). There's a fish van and a meat + fresh produce van which comes on a (relatively) predictable schedule. Nearest supermarket is 2-3 hours drive, more due to road quality than physical distance, so people still go there semi-regularly and generally run big deep freezes.
Why? UK includes Scotland, and you can easily go 600+ miles from a point in northern Scotland to southern England. Even in England, Liverpool is 200+ miles from London, and there are farther places in England.
I don't think so - at least if you exclude islands and villages on the mainland not connected to the rest of the road network (Inverie being the only one I'm aware of).
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.
In densely populated areas like much of Europe, a half hour drive is considered a pretty meaningful distance. Plus a lot fewer people have cars than in the US.
It's true that a supermarket or a shop is about 30 min drive for most places, but those rural areas are typically poorer, and populated with the elderly, so driving is not an option.
And the supermarkets and multi-good shops are usually the new and expensive places to shop. It’s the farmers markets and stalls (and maybe the baker) that have the good pricing, but fewer availability of hours.
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!
depending on the region it could be something like Mišo Kovač (Dalmatia)[1] or any tamburaši band (Slavonia)[2]. Istria and Zagorje have their own horses in the race, but I cannot name any.
To be fair we saw 1-4 car crashes every time we took a bus for 30+minutes in Croatia in the early 2000s so it was probably just to have some people left in the village ;)
Exactly, warehouse stores started off as wholesalers for commercial customers, and then gradually shifted towards retail. A few years ago, Costco used to open an hour earlier for commercial customers, but I’m not sure they do it anymore. A few aisles are more for businesses, for example takeout containers, cleaning supplies, etc. I’ve seen owners of food truck, small restaurants, and mom&pop convenience stores getting their bulk supplies there.
It's probably not actually a U-Haul, I just couldn't think of the name of the type of truck and figured enough people have seen big U-Haul trucks that they'd be able to picture the size of truck I'm talking about.
Long-term rental? I'm sure you can get a good deal on it, and since they don't own it, they can swap it out every week for another model, and if it breaks down it's not their problem. Or well it is, but it won't cost them much.
I mean when you buy a Penske truck with the logos removed, it's just a yellow box truck. A u-haul is always going to have the distinctive shape, and they usually don't do a great job at removing the logos... They might have scraped off most of the logo, but they don't paint over it.
Most of the restaurants on Kaua'i also do this. I've many times seen the restaurant owners while shopping and recognize the packaging or products in the restaurant.
In Thailand and SE Asia there is a lot of retailers based on pick-up truck that is making slow rounds along country roads, through remote villages selling necessities like vegetables, food etc.
> Parker did some work around town, scrounged together $3k, and began taking a state-subsidized ferry to Juneau, where he bought Costco inventory to resell in Gustavus at a small markup.
> 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.
Occasionally ships can be had for extremely cheap when the former owner cannot afford the maintenance on it. It's more common with small pleasure craft, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear about small cargo ships being occasionally abandoned up there.
Indeed: even if you get a ship for free, the crew is not free. Unless you're a certified captain already, you probably can't just operate the ship yourself. Also, now you have to pay for maintenance, fuel, mooring, loading and unloading cargo, etc. I suspect that $3k is not sufficient to start and sustain such an operation, so some steps are clearly missing.
(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.)
My favourite example is Roman Abramovich, who somehow made the transition from reselling rubber ducks from his apartment in 1991 to having $100M to buy an oil company worth $3B, to obscene oligarch wealth a decade later.
Used work boats are extraordinarily cheap, usually $10k for a 40' boat that's 16' wide, and then another 10-15K for a used marine diesel engine. Compare that to a fiberglass pleasure yacht where you might pay $30k for a 30' boat and 50K for a 40' sailboat used, plus 8-12k for a marine diesel engine.
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 scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just that everyone is making it at home instead of buying it with meals at restaurants. One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case.
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?
I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags".
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.
> I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags".
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):
In the US (and Europe, too, I believe) food manufacturers are increasingly mandated to be able to trace their ingredients back to the original source. Each handler along the way is expected to do this, so theoretically there's a paper trail from the beginning to the end on a store shelf.
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.
Inquire with the manufacturer listed on the packaging? There's always some sort of chain to information on packaging, though unless there are laws in place against this, I think we're moving closer to that starting with a qr code than a company name and phone number/address...
Calling/writing to customer service is usually a good start. A lot of this information they are required to have even if they don't need to write it on the label.
Unless they bought a single 20 lbs bag, or they open all four bags, they have 15 lbs stored airtight and dark by default.
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.
I remember reading a similar article about disinfecting wipes - the bottleneck is actually in the plastic containers, not the wipes, and so a few companies have started packaging them in bags like baby wipes.
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.
The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?
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.
Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.
Also, store bought bread today lasts a lot longer than store bought bread from when I was growing up. I can't imagine the chemical concoction that allows for this...
> Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?
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.
Restaurants and factories use much bigger (and plainer-looking) bags of flour than end-consumers, so retooling probably requires changes to the "paper bag" supply chain...
There’s no “bread” in bread, so the commercial bakeries are always going bankrupt, consolidating and squeezing every penny possible out of the business.
The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available.
> 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...
Bakeries in The Netherlands do quite well actually. Although they also sell patisserie and sometimes (too expensive) baking stuff, the main part is bread.
If it works, it's delicious and you end up eating heaps more than usual.
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...)
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!
This only helps much if the calibration is off linearly - in my case not only is the calibration off but the temperature flux up/down is more pronounced than it should be. I still make do, but it's definitely very easy for stuff to come out burnt or undercooked as a result.
Other have suggested ways to check your oven temp control, but one way to mitigate the problem slightly is to add some thermal mass to your oven. Unglazed quarry tile makes a nice baking surface and a double layer of that will prevent big temp oscillations in your oven.
When the temperature sensor in caked with something that provides thermal insulation the resulting lag in temperature feedback would mess with the oven's temperature control.
I concur. I've made three loaves of bread and two pies during all this, and will likely make another loaf this week. Just because I want something to do and wanted to learn how to bake more. I had to get yeast shipped to me from a friend out of state though, as it was already gone here.
One trick that worked for me was to look for fresh yeast. Everyone thinks of the packets of dry yeast, but forget that in the refrigerated section there will be some fresh yeast. I was able to find that long after all the dry packets were gone.
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!
She can make those packs go a LONG way, given enough rising time, with superior flavor to boot. E.g. the pizza dough with poolish in Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" uses 0.4g dry yeast per 1kg of flour.
I've been buying instant yeast at a restaurant supply store for $5/lb, decanting into 8oz Mason jars, and selling it to neighbors. Something like 5lb so far.
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.
The most likely explanation to me is (4) -- but it's because flour (et al) producers are struggling to get their flour into the consumer supply chain. Shipping goods to businesses is quite different to shipping it to consumers -- businesses order in bulk and (to be frank) don't care as much about trivial things like packaging or minor product differentiation. Compare the giant packages of cheese and cured meat at your deli counter to the small individually wrapped packages you get elsewhere.
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).
Retail flour is the issue. You can get a 50 lb bag pretty easily, and honestly if you are going to use more than a few supermarket bags of flour, you could throw half away and still be ahead financially.
Businesses may have trouble mixing commercial and consumer lines of flour. Commercial kitchens may get large bags of flour delivered, and the system in place supports those kitchens on a lean inventory basis. Grocery stores may not feel comfortable stocking flour packaged for commercial kitchens. Selling 20 pound white-box-looking flour does not look attractive in grocery stores.
Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking. My mother did this. My grandmother did this. Many of my 23 year old friends did this.
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.
> Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking
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)
We bought 40lb of flour and 20lb of sugar in early March; it was one of our last “preps” going into all this. We don’t normally go through either in any quantity - my wife and are both usually on keto. We’ve used all the flour (and have bought more), and most of the sugar.
My flour usage has gone way up, but there was a shortage of yeast in my city and when I was eventually able to get some, it was a werid brand and such a large package that had more yeast that I could use in years.
Usually domestic sales in small bags are a tiny fraction of the amount sold in large bags to commercial users. When consumption switched to home use then those small bags sold out quickly. The small bags are still there in the supply chain, it's just that the demand has gone through the roof so it's hard to find them.
Packaging issue I think. Bakers have no trouble finding any, and in my city at least one baker took the opportunity and resold floor in paper bags (at pretty absurd markup).
Consumer flour and commercial/industrial flour are apparently different enough that they can't easily redirect the latter into the former's supply chain.
> . One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case.
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.
They pay more to Sysco for trade credit and delivery. When you buy at a restaurant depot type place, prices are similar to a Costco for unfinished cuts.
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.
But that's the thing - a restaurant depot is not suffering from the lack of customers because it is not designed to sell commodity products at a premium.
You can create an account on most of the restaurant supply services and place pre-paid orders. You would be shocked at the pricing ( there would be a minimum order value as well )
I've been placing orders with a specialty restaurant supplier here in Boston, and the prices are generally equal or better than retail. Including delivery! As long as we're up for eating the minimum quantity it's a good deal.
They are comparable to Whole Foods or special store prices which are significantly higher than prices in grocery stores regular people ( read : people who don't spend $100/dinner for two and don't bat an eye ) shop.
I'm pretty price-conscious, and our household spends ~$140/person/month on groceries (with most meals eaten in the home).
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.
Since of those I will only buy a few items I can tell you the prices here, in NYC in a non-ethnic but non expensive supermarkets:
* 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 )
None of the examples you're listing are 2x; those are 1.4x, 1.6x, 1x, and 1.7x. The prices you're listing are also lower than what I see in the cheap grocery stores here, not sure why?
(They also are delivering to consumers; we've been putting in a weekly order and it's a way better experience than Instacart.)
Retail packaging is a pain to deal with, take for example salt. You usually buy it in small boxes, about 1-2lbs each, commercial bags are 40-50lbs. So you need to buy 20-30 boxes a week at your local store, open the boxes one by one and empty it all into your restaurant bin. It's really a convenience thing, it's much easier to handle, transport and store a single really big bag. You still buy retail for stuff that makes sense though, maybe you only need like 2lb of lemons a week to make a sauce, in that case you'd go retail.
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.
I visited Dawson City in the Yukon last year and was surprised to see Kirkland Signature goods on sale at the general store. Didn't think to ask how they got there.
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)
Some of the prices were insane, some of them are exactly what I pay at my grocery store in Brooklyn. $7.99 for a block of cheese? Yup. But as the weight/volume increases, their prices skyrocket where wight/volume doesn't seem to matter at all here. Obviously that's where the cost comes from.
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.
> 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.
> “The town might have a 100-gallon swing in demand for milk from one week to the next without any explanation of why. One week, nobody wants whole milk; the next week, everyone wants 2%.”
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.
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.
It's interesting to see how the only grocery store in a remote place works. I've become interested in the story in another country, especially in my own country (Indonesia) an Asia generally.
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.
As I live and breathe - we're talking about ToshCo. I have shopped here, spent time in Gustavus, enjoyed the greatest July 4th celebration in the US here while climbing a grease pole. Funny thing is that not all the residents can buy stuff from ToshCo because it's more expensive, so they go to the local thrift store instead, aka Treasure store.
It's an impressive and respectable story of entrepreneurial behavior and solving a town's problems.
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.
My one trip to Molokai some 7 or 8 years ago. The main market had staples that were primarily split up bundles from Costco. So it seems like (given the other posts) a common model.
Unfortunately it's one of those series that you can't get the unaltered original because of music rights. (It's also pretty much a complete fantasy view of a small Alaskan town but it was a fun series in any case.)
