I forgot to mention, my roommate and I finally accumulated three bags of cans and went down to the bottle deposit place to get our due. Unlike in New York, apparently, regular stores don't accept deposit cans, so you have to go to some dank, smelly warehouse in east Cambridge to claim your reward. And, as I predicted, this warehouse was full of homeless people plying their trade. Also, you have to sort and arrange your own cans. After all that, we got fully $3.20 for our efforts. This is barely enough to buy a latte.
I concluded from this adventure that in order to get the most out of this deposit law, one really needs to have either 10 beer parties a month or 10 soda-guzzling children. But I still intend to go back in June and get another $3 worth of thrift.
Showing posts with label time and money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time and money. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Money-and-Time debate, continued
When sidewalk guilt-peddlers ask you to donate to Greenpeace, to a cause promoting gay marriage, or to the ACLU, they ask you not for your money, but for your time. "Do you have a minute for the environment?" Not everyone has a dollar to spare, but all among us who can reasonably expect our lifespans to extend more than one minute into the future might want to consider offering the following minute to a cause so much greater than ourselves. In this, they one-up the "a penny for the homeless" folks down the street - "just one penny is all we ask" is still a request for money, which we accept people might have to hold onto and reserve for their own uses, including charity more thought-out than giving to someone who happens to be asking at a major intersection. Time, however, is seen as basically infinite. Sure, "time is money" - but that's only for high-powered lawyers who bill by the hour. I could not, as a grad student, say with a straight face that my time is money. My time is... time. I value it as such.
The Park Slope Food Co-op (an institution I alienated myself from early on and proceeded to walk past daily for two years, living around the corner from it but stubbornly refusing to join, admittedly in part because I imagined they might have a picture of me somewhere in the back as someone not to allow in, a not entirely unfounded fear given that what I wrote was written up in their newsletter) is premised on the idea that time is not money. OK, it's premised on a number of causes and ideas, but fundamental to the project is the notion that one is getting a discount on groceries. As explained in the most recent take-down of the supermarket-that-isn't:
After a moment's consideration, it becomes clear that whatever markup there is at Whole Foods (and, by the way, Whole Foods sells perfectly good 365-brand olive oil for far less than the cost of this overly-voweled organic one) comes from the fact that to shop at Whole Foods, you are not required to work at Whole Foods, and can indeed head there after a day of your own job, shop, go home, and be done with it. Now, I could hold forth once again on how the work requirements of the Co-op are largely about yuppie liberal guilt at being served in a regular supermarket by a cashier from a different class and often race background, and how the We Are All Cashiers Now approach actually takes jobs away from would-be cashiers looking for paid work, but that's not the issue here. The issue here is that if you have to work to get a discount on groceries, you are not getting a discount on groceries.
The same is true, apparently, of apple-picking. I don't believe I've ever picked an apple, but Daniel Gross had me convinced to fully despise apple-picking, once he framed his argument as being anti-terroir:
We've been educated (or bullied, depending on your outlook) by foodies like Alice Waters and Dan Barber to adopt the European concept of terroir—the best stuff to consume is the stuff grown in closest proximity. For people in the Northeast, that's fine in the summer, when the Union Square greenmarket bursts with locally grown exotic greens, yellow squash, and heirloom tomatoes of such flavor (and cost) as to make a gourmand weep.
But in the fall, while the region's landscape lights up with foliage, the farm stands' color palette becomes more drab: potatoes, root vegetables, pumpkins, gourds, and, of course, apples. And so, to the pick-your-own orchards we go.
I could hold forth once more on my deep suspicions of terroir and my conviction that it is a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic ideology, but the issue here is, once again, money and time, so I'll attempt to focus on that angle.
Gross argues that apple-picking is basically a scam for orchards to place the time and labor burdens of their own businesses into the hands of consumers, who must in fact pay for the pleasure of working. Again, coming at this with no apple-picking prior knowledge, I can't say I'm shocked - the same is apparently true of the DIY archeological digs in Israel, and one could argue that the ever-rising price of coffee drinks coinciding with the ever-reduced services we expect coffee-shop workers to perform (pouring in the milk yourself is generally a good thing; attempting to bus your table into a hard-to-locate and already-full tub of dishes at an understaffed coffee bar is not) falls into this same category.
In all of these cases - moments for the environment, volunteer shifts at the Co-op, apples and archeological shards plucked by consumers, tables bused by paying and often even tipping customers - it starts to look like time has a different and if anything more important value than money for the yuppie mired in guilt. By showing his willingness to take the time to do a task a previous generation would have conferred on an underling, the yuppie of today shows his discomfort with the class system, and that he doesn't see himself as too busy and important to stop and be The Worker at a few particularly visible moments, as appropriate. The archeological shards are perhaps a case not so much of yuppie guilt as Diaspora-Zionist guilt, but the principle's the same. Offering time rather than (much) money might ultimately mean a lower commitment, but it's often a more visible one.
The Park Slope Food Co-op (an institution I alienated myself from early on and proceeded to walk past daily for two years, living around the corner from it but stubbornly refusing to join, admittedly in part because I imagined they might have a picture of me somewhere in the back as someone not to allow in, a not entirely unfounded fear given that what I wrote was written up in their newsletter) is premised on the idea that time is not money. OK, it's premised on a number of causes and ideas, but fundamental to the project is the notion that one is getting a discount on groceries. As explained in the most recent take-down of the supermarket-that-isn't:
Unlike many co-ops — including the Flatbush Food Coop in Brooklyn, where guests are allowed to shop without joining and members who don’t want to serve work hours can pay a slight markup for items — Park Slope has one of the stiffest work requirements: 2.75 hours every four weeks for each adult member of a household.
It also has some of the best bargains. The organic spinach that costs $2.97 at the co-op fetches $3.99 at the Whole Foods in Union Square; 17 ounces of Bionaturae Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil costs co-op members $7.80 and Whole Foods shoppers $13.99.
After a moment's consideration, it becomes clear that whatever markup there is at Whole Foods (and, by the way, Whole Foods sells perfectly good 365-brand olive oil for far less than the cost of this overly-voweled organic one) comes from the fact that to shop at Whole Foods, you are not required to work at Whole Foods, and can indeed head there after a day of your own job, shop, go home, and be done with it. Now, I could hold forth once again on how the work requirements of the Co-op are largely about yuppie liberal guilt at being served in a regular supermarket by a cashier from a different class and often race background, and how the We Are All Cashiers Now approach actually takes jobs away from would-be cashiers looking for paid work, but that's not the issue here. The issue here is that if you have to work to get a discount on groceries, you are not getting a discount on groceries.
The same is true, apparently, of apple-picking. I don't believe I've ever picked an apple, but Daniel Gross had me convinced to fully despise apple-picking, once he framed his argument as being anti-terroir:
We've been educated (or bullied, depending on your outlook) by foodies like Alice Waters and Dan Barber to adopt the European concept of terroir—the best stuff to consume is the stuff grown in closest proximity. For people in the Northeast, that's fine in the summer, when the Union Square greenmarket bursts with locally grown exotic greens, yellow squash, and heirloom tomatoes of such flavor (and cost) as to make a gourmand weep.
But in the fall, while the region's landscape lights up with foliage, the farm stands' color palette becomes more drab: potatoes, root vegetables, pumpkins, gourds, and, of course, apples. And so, to the pick-your-own orchards we go.
I could hold forth once more on my deep suspicions of terroir and my conviction that it is a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic ideology, but the issue here is, once again, money and time, so I'll attempt to focus on that angle.
Gross argues that apple-picking is basically a scam for orchards to place the time and labor burdens of their own businesses into the hands of consumers, who must in fact pay for the pleasure of working. Again, coming at this with no apple-picking prior knowledge, I can't say I'm shocked - the same is apparently true of the DIY archeological digs in Israel, and one could argue that the ever-rising price of coffee drinks coinciding with the ever-reduced services we expect coffee-shop workers to perform (pouring in the milk yourself is generally a good thing; attempting to bus your table into a hard-to-locate and already-full tub of dishes at an understaffed coffee bar is not) falls into this same category.
In all of these cases - moments for the environment, volunteer shifts at the Co-op, apples and archeological shards plucked by consumers, tables bused by paying and often even tipping customers - it starts to look like time has a different and if anything more important value than money for the yuppie mired in guilt. By showing his willingness to take the time to do a task a previous generation would have conferred on an underling, the yuppie of today shows his discomfort with the class system, and that he doesn't see himself as too busy and important to stop and be The Worker at a few particularly visible moments, as appropriate. The archeological shards are perhaps a case not so much of yuppie guilt as Diaspora-Zionist guilt, but the principle's the same. Offering time rather than (much) money might ultimately mean a lower commitment, but it's often a more visible one.
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