Noitalever: Free Samples?

Today, I went to the Cheese Walk at the Moscow Co-Op. Whereas the cheese samples were very good, the procedural stuff disappointed me. There were about ten sampling stations set up throughout the store, and nine of them had serious shortcomings for a Co-Op sponsored event.

1) Each station had a “trash can” created from a paper grocery sack and lined with a plastic bag! Okay, Co-Op. Seriously. I think we’ll be fine throwing our trash into a simple paper sack, especially since we were throwing away things like toothpicks.

2) Were they composting? I couldn’t be sure. The lady at the first station assured me that the trash would be sorted later, but it seems like it would have been a lot easier just to separate it from the start. Additionally, she might have been saying that to appease me, and that thought makes me cranky.

3) Sometimes, there were wine and beer samples in plastic sample cups! Other stations had paper sample cups of roughly the same size – why couldn’t they just use those? The swig of wine or beer would be gone before it could degrade the cup anyways.

4) Cheese is almost always wrapped in cellophane or packaged in a plastic tub. I feel like it’s better to get the latter, because then you can either reuse the tub or recycle it.

5) They were inviting people to use plastic spoons to sample the soft cheese when they had bread available as well.

Are you wondering what the tenth station was? Well, it wasn’t really cheese at all! It was a coffee station, and they made the coffee in a porcelain coffee maker and poured it into compostable cups (which is really good, because I’d left mine in the car – shame on me!). The guy even told me to drink my coffee within the hour or the cup would start breaking down…lol! The shining crown on this coffee drinking experience, however, was the stir sticks. They were strands of pasta! This worked great, and I wish coffee shops all over would start offering this option. Starbucks would never do it, of course, but I bet that there are a lot of neighborhood coffee shops that would be up for this change.