Letters - Paper bag, plastic bag, bring your own bag, Trader Joe

A recent letter to Trader Joe about their efforts to get people to bring their own shopping bags - feel free to cannibalize and plagiarize -


Hello Trade Joe,
I am writing about TJ's efforts to get people to bring their own bags. At the check out counter recently, the shopper at the next register commented to the cashier that she always brings her bags, has done so since BEFORE the raffle program started and has yet to win the monthly raffle. Overhearing her, I commented that I had just expressed the same thoughts to my cashier!
First off, I suggest TJ discard it's raffle program for people who have brought their own bag and replace it with a program that many other grocers have - 5 cents off per bag used that a shopper brings. Be honest - when I bring my own bag, I am saving TJ money. Yeah I know, TJ's reflects it in the price but the point is you have bought the bags already - bringing my own, I am making your stock of bags last longer, thus directly saving TJ money. A raffle is nice - but at 4 bags per week, I would save over $10 per year. That encourages me much more than a remote possibility that I might win a $20 gift certificate in a monthly drawing. I know TJ's has some bean counters somewhere who think TJ's prices are the only thing that matters but if that was true, you wouldn't have samples.
Second, cashiers need better training regarding bagging cloth bags. Recently I brought a bunch of my own bags, more than needed to pack all my groceries. I did so to be able to separate items. The cashier though was determined to pack the wine bottles in individual paper sacks (like that will keep a wine bottle from breaking but my applesauce jar is ok without extra bagging) and frozen items in plastic bags. From my view, a customer who brings their own bags can be identified as a customer who is trying to avoid bringing plastic and paper bags home. From my varied experiences with cashiers when bringing my own bags, it appears to me that TJ's does not have consistent training on the subject.
Let me know if you would like specific ideas that would improve the bagging process.

what is good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa

It is now the law of Miami, soon to be nationwide, that a major league baseball (MLB) team is in the interests of the public good. Thus public financing that is limited by law to financing for projects that serve "the public good" is available to a private entity - the local MLB team.

In a court decision from the Miami-Dade Circuit Court, it was upheld that public financing of a baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins baseball team served the public good and is thus allowed (and available). This is the Miami Herald article on September 10, 2008 -
http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/baseball/florida-marlins/story/679722.html

Earlier this week the federal government took over mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and appears to be preparing to bail out the latest failing investment bank, Lehman Brothers. On Monday morning after the takeover announcement, the financial news cable channel CNBC, had numerous talking heads explaining how there was really nothing else the government could do due to the large scope of shareholders - "it would touch everyone". Occasionally a voice was raised that "isn't this socialism?" but fewer were willing to call it what it really is - corporate welfare. Tip of the hat to Jim Rogers, a man with money in the market who said on CNBC: "America is more communist than China is right now. You can see that this is welfare of the rich, it is socialism for the rich… it's just bailing out financial institutions," Rogers said. http://www.cnbc.com/id/26603489

So despite the decline of General Motors, things remain the same, although the names have been changed. If it is good for the country it is good for the corporation, public or private, and if it is good for the corporation, of course it is good for the nation. When the Marlins start play in their new publicly financed stadium, I hope the public good includes food and beer concession prices that are more reasonable than at my current favorite publicly financed (and given away to the team owners) MLB stadium, Nationals Park in Washington, DC (awaiting the selling of the name to yet another corporate entity).




from Wikipedia -
In 1953, Charles Erwin Wilson, then GM president, was named by Eisenhower as Secretary of Defense. When he was asked during the hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". Later this statement was often misquoted, suggesting that Wilson had said simply, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." At the time, GM was one of the largest employers in the world – only Soviet state industries employed more people. In 1955, General Motors became the first American corporation to pay taxes of over $1,000 million.[1]

When The Music Hits You, You Feel No Pain

When the music hits you, you feel no pain

There is a Charm: a Power that sways the breast;
Bids every Passion revel or be still;
Inspires with Rage, or all your Cares dissolves;
Can sooth Distraction, and almost Despair.
That Power is Music.

A Poet he, and touch'd with Heaven's own fire;
Who, with bold rage or solemn pomp of sounds,
Inflames, exalts, and ravishes the soul;
Now tender, plaintive, sweet almost to pain,
In Love dissolves you; now in sprightly strains
Breathes a gay rapture thro' your thrilling breast;
Or melts the heart with airs divinely sad;
Or wakes to horror the tremendous strings.

Such was the bard, whose heavenly strains of old
Appeas'd the fiend of melancholy Saul.
Such was, if old and heathen fame say true,
The man who bade the Theban domes ascend,
And tam'd the savage nations with his song;
And such the Thracian, whose harmonious lyre,
Tun'd to soft woe, made all the mountains weep;
Sooth'd even th' inexorable powers of Hell,
And half redeem'd his lost Eurydice.

Music exalts each Joy, allays each Grief,
Expells Diseases, softens Pain,
Subdues the rage of Poison, and the Plague;
And hence the wise of ancient days ador'd
One power of Physic, Melody, and Song.

John Armstrong
The Art of Preserving Health (1744)
IV 481-485, 497-518
as quoted in Music and Medicine (1948),
Dorothy M. Schullian and Max Schoen


When the music hits you,
You feel no pain.
Bob Marley