“And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.” (Mark 2:22 New International Version)
I just came home from picking up a few items at the Stop & Shop supermarket on Old Connecticut Path in Framingham. One of the shoppers in front of me in the checkout line asked for her bags to be “paper in plastic”. I was surprised that the checker told her Stop & Shop does NOT use paper bags anymore. I know that up until very recently they WERE using paper bags, so that WAS a surprise. At Market Basket, where Mary Ann and I did a “major” shopping trip last night, they still offer paper and plastic bags. I’m usually fine with plastic, but I like to get a few paper bags to use for recycling.
I guess I’m behind the times on that, too. When Framingham started curbside recycling somewhere around 1991, each household was given a blue plastic container box. We were instructed to sort our newspapers, plastics, and metals, and to put them in various paper (not plastic) bags. I have tended to continue that practice, although I guess for at least 7 years, it’s no longer been necessary to sort the recyclables. You just put them all in the blue bin (or larger yellow container) and they pick them up. If you’re a Framingham resident, you probably know that in around 3-4 weeks, recycling will drastically change here. We’re all being given 96-gallon containers on wheels for recycling that will go out every OTHER week, and a “robot” truck will automatically pick up each container, dump them, and place them back on the ground! Again, the paper bag sorting is no longer necessary.
Today, supermarkets are encouraging the use of those reusable CANVAS bags. We haven’t started with those yet. There’s a lot of good to using them, BUT they can collect bacteria and therefore need to be periodically washed in your washing machine.
While I mostly pay cash at supermarkets, when I don’t have cash on hand, I’m one of those who likes to write a check rather than use a debit card. If your checking account is “iffy”, the check won’t clear for a day or two, whereas the debit card goes through immediately. Now, I can still write checks at Market Basket (with a Market Basket card and my driver’s license). However, I’ve noticed that writing a check at Stop & Shop does you no good as far as keeping the sum from “hitting” the checking account for a day or two. At Stop & Shop they put the check through electronically JUST AS IF IT WAS A DEBIT CARD and then hand your actual written check back to you!
My, it’s sure a different world than it was twenty or thirty years ago! In many ways, as the pop song says, I’m “stuck in 1985”! I recently heard a secular talk show host say he thinks it would be a great idea for all of us to get identity chips implanted into each of us for a myriad of reasons. It’s understandable WHY this WILL eventually happen- but keep in mind it’s also PROBABLY “The Mark of the Beast” from the Book of Revelation.
Finally, if you live in the south or midwest, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about when I say a “bag”. In most of the south and midwest, a paper or plastic “bag” is called a paper or plastic “sack”!
EMMYS 1966: The Dick Van Dyke Show (season 5)
4 years ago
2 comments:
haha very true about them calling it a sack! Also, did you know that here in Missouri, they are talking about going to strictly PAPER bags and getting rid of PLASTIC?? We live in different worlds.
The silly reusable "canvas bag" thing is simply a moneymaker propagated by the extreme environmentalist agenda. It is no more environmentally friendly than anything else ultimately, as I'm sure at this point paper bags are made from recycled paper. As stated, they must be washed, they can be awkward to carry, and God knows how many one would need to purchase when doing a large shop. Do perishables still demand their own bag? What of fragile items like eggs? And where are these bags stored when you are done with them until they are again needed? Are they provided freely, or must they be bought? Perhaps if some sort of system were worked out that were like the old Coca-Cola bottle returns of the '50s, whereby the store would bag your groceries and you would return said bags to the store upon your next visit, it might be worthwhile. Still, I consider that in such an instance it's likely easier for the consumer to just have his groceries delivered, which Stop & Shop does.
On a side note, my reading of Revelation emphatically leads me to believe that subcutaneous identifying microchips are most certainly not the "Mark of the Beast", and that that is a notion propagated by paranoid Christians of the 1980s and science fiction writers. Nor do I believe such a technological intrusion can or will ever be put into widespread practice.
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