Wednesday Walk: Boxing Day
Exchanging empty boxes with neighbors, criminalizing baby formula, and buying new sunglasses
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
If you enjoy what you’re reading, please consider a free subscribtion to receive emails every Wednesday and Sunday plus podcast episodes every two weeks. There are also paid options, which unlock even more features.
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Some Personal News
To begin this week, I have a few updates from the Racela household. We have been quietly considering a move for a few months and frankly considered options both around the country and around the world.
In the end, we have decided to start a new chapter, though we’ll only be about an hour west of our current home. We recently saw a listing for a very unique house that was built to look and feel like a classic Victorian, except it was built brand new in the 1980s. For me, this is the best of both worlds. The house has beautiful wood floors, stained glass windows, and lots of other “old house” details that I love, but it also has a large, dry basement with poured concrete walls (unlike our current 1910 house, which has a rubble stone foundation). We officially close in early March and will be slowly moving our life out west over the coming months.
We have started packing up our current house, but one of the problems we encountered was figuring out the best approach to boxing our stuff. We have a handful of cardboard boxes from online purchases and our local meat delivery service that we’ve been able to repurpose for packing, but it was not nearly enough.
Buying virgin cardboard boxes to use once and recycle seemed wasteful. Using plastic bins was also wasteful and expensive.
My wife belongs to a Buy Nothing group and found a family in the town next to ours who had recently moved and had a bunch of moving boxes that they needed to discard. Over the weekend, I went to pick them up. They literally had more empty boxes than my minivan could hold!
That other family is still in the process of moving in and unpacking and offered us even more boxes if we want them.
The truth of the matter is, moving boxes should be something that can be endlessly reused. They store items for a few weeks, then are unpacked and are no longer needed. They’re usually too large to be reused for shipping items.
In our case, we were fortunate enough to connect with another family that was moving in just as we are moving out, but people are constantly moving all the time. It seems like U-Haul or some other company that sells boxes should be able to help facilitate the sharing and reuse of moving boxes so that new ones aren’t used one time and recycled or thrown away.
While we are excited about the move, it also means leaving behind the place that we’ve called home for more than 15 years. Those of you who have been longtime readers of this newsletter (or listeners to the podcast) likely know how connected we feel to this land, a connection that only got solidified during COVID.
To that point, I had quite the weekend of maple syrup production! The weather was warm and I was able to boil on both Saturday and Sunday. I got the fire hotter than I ever have before and was able to get finished and bottled syrup by dinnertime both days. Sometimes it can take me all day and well into the night to finish the outside portion of the boil, and I have to complete the inside portion the next day. Something about this year just seems to be running smoothly.
Perhaps it’s the Maple Gods’ way of smiling on me and blessing me with one last good run of homemade syrup. It’s hard to tell without leaves on the trees, but I’m quite sure that for all that we like about our new house, the new yard seems to be devoid of any maple trees. So I’ll have to find a new way to pass the late winters starting next February.
Fort Knox Formula
Over the weekend, I also found myself in a local Wal-Mart. It’s a store that I go to as an absolute last resort and only after exhausting all other options, but they do have one particular type of chocolate that’s sugar free and compliant with our diet, so I end up there maybe four times a year to buy a few bags and hope to not have to return for a while.
When I worked at Target for a few months 20 years ago, every inch of the store was covered in video cameras. The security team could enter a receipt number into their computer and instantly watch playback of the entire transaction from several cameras mounted near the registers. I can only imagine in the ensuing two decades, video monitoring has only gotten worse (remember, 20 years ago, most cell phones barely had cameras).
It’s easy to forget that retailers are blanketed with video surveillance, but sometimes stores want to make their security team’s presence known and will install a video monitor showing a camera feed near products that have a risk of high theft.
On this particular trip to Wal-Mart, I could sense a video monitor recording me as I was walking through the store and looked around to see where I was. I was in the baby formula aisle.
A part of me was shocked. Wal-Mart is full of other high risk items, from electronics to guns, and they chose to put extra scrutiny into the baby formula?!
I looked into it and because of the formula shortage last year, there seems to be some incidents of organized formula theft being taken and resold. ($26,000 worth found in Atlanta and $12,000 worth in Tennessee for example).
But I also found stories of people who are in a desperate place and have no choice but to steal a can of formula to feed their baby. I read a Reddit thread about a security worker at a major retailer who opts to look the other way when people steal small amounts of formula or other food. This response really hit me hard:
“Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Twenty-seven years ago, you - or someone like you - looked the other way when I needed to feed my son.”
Other Reddit threads featured formula behind locked glass cases, although CVS and Target lock up even innocuous things like toothpaste and deodorant. Formula is certainly a higher cost item than those.
I’m not sure what the right answer is in this case. I think if baby formula and other necessary products were easily accessible to parents of all means, there would be less need for both individual theft and mass crime rings that can resell stolen formula. Criminalizing the theft of a necessary product feels cruel, but it’s not necessarily Wal-Mart’s responsibility to provide formula. The government should really do that as it’s in all of our best interests to have fed babies.
We are constantly told by the American politicians that there is not enough funding to provide food for the poor, housing for the homeless, or health care for all, yet we can send military aid to Israel and spend endlessly on the defense industry. The money is there, we’ve just chosen to prioritize the military industrial complex over hungry babies.
So for now, the cameras and locked cases remain.
#NoNewClothes
It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on my No New Clothes challenge, which officially wrapped up in October but has basically been ongoing and never really finished for me.
Last September, I wrote about needing new sunglasses and considering some used Ray-Bans because they seemed durable. Soon after writing that, I decided to just start wearing some cheap promotional sunglasses that my wife had received as swag at a convention. They looked cheap, but I didn’t want to buy something new if I could help it.
Recently, I was given an award at work which came with some kind of rewards points. It’s similar to a credit card rewards program I guess, but it was also reminiscent of those elementary school fundraisers where if you raise enough money, you can redeem a boombox (Elder Millennials will understand).
The website where I went to redeem my points had (and I am not exaggerating) more than 100,000 items available. It was a little overwhelming.
After doing some browsing, I realized that they had new Ray-Ban sunglasses available and that I had enough points to redeem for the upgraded polarized lenses with no out of pocket cost to me.
While I am reluctant to purchase something new if I can help it, my hope is that by buying something of a higher quality, it will last a long, long time. Ray-Ban parts are also readily available, making them easily repairable.
It took some time for me to decide on the exact style- I had to go to the Sunglasses Hut kiosk in Macy’s to try a few on before I found what I wanted.
(Side note: this particular Macy’s is the one in Downtown Crossing Boston, an area I’ve written about before. It’s interesting that under this one roof, there’s a Sunglasses Hut store within a store, a Toys R Us store within a store, and a Starbucks location within Macy’s. At one time, these would have all been discreet stores, but their survival now seems to depend on all banding together and having the department store replicate what used to be a mall experience.)
My new sunglasses just arrived yesterday and I’m quite excited to wear them. They retail for $175, which is about six times more than I’m used to paying for sunglasses! (My last pair that I remember buying were Kirkland Signature brand). Again though, I was able to get them for free, so I’m not complaining. If I’m given free money for consuming things, I still want to be intentional about what I’m getting, selecting something that will hopefully last a long time and be fixable down the line.
I publish new issues every Wednesday and Sunday. Sign up to always receive the latest issue and support my work:
Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
Way cool! Congrats on your upcoming move! And also awesome that you were able to score free boxes. I'm of the same mindset, there is so much out there that can be reused or acquired for little to no money, it just takes a little community networking. So funny you mentioned moving a little further west, I was looking at real estate in North Adams on Redfin yesterday just for fun. Some real solid values out there for less then $250k. Have an awesome day!