The Price of Coffee and Other Existential Issues
This morning, pulling up at the coffee shop with the dogs, a huge recycling truck was emptying 14 bins from the curb in front of the store. It’s a one-man truck. A worker for the store, hired for this purpose, was helping. The worker, the night before, hauls these heavy recycling bins down 20 steps to the curb, then returns the empty ones up the steps, backbreaking work. He helps the truck operator with any spillage, and then provides him, kindly, with a hot cup of coffee.
The shop owner has to pay this man and provide benefits; purchase the additional bins beyond the ones he gets for free, service and repair and replace them; and manage to get this all done every week, even in snow and ice, when the helper isn’t available.
And you wonder why the price of coffee is going up?
We have a recycling bin we keep inside the stone wall and haul the recycling to it in our car trunks, putting the bin out once a week. At one point I received a sticker, warning me of a fine because I had broken the rules, and the bin wasn’t emptied. I had thrown plastic recyclables in the bin including the plastic bag holding them. Whoops! You can’t include the plastic bag with the plastics inside it!
In Providence, there are recycling officers who inspect and issue citations for the wrong kind of stuff in the container. The taxpayers pay for that. And a state legislator, of limited intelligence, proposed a bill demanding that all landscapers change from gas-powered equipment to battery-powered within a year, mindless of the fact that using three batteries to keep a piece of equipment charged all day is actually worse than using gasoline. Moreover, who pays these people for abandoning equipment no one would buy and purchasing all new equipment? She was offering them $100 or so!
Guess who would pay for that? The customers.
I forget who said this, but “Saints engage in lofty introspection while burly sinners run the world.” Existential concerns may have their place, but first we have to “exist.”
