The amount of perfectly OK cheesecake that looks barely damaged but can’t sell but can’t take home is very high. But my small town bakery, I can take the store home with me if there’s product leftover.
They could donate the food to a food bank and be completely shielded from liability by Good Samaritan Act
They don’t want to because it means that poor people can eat for free (gasp) which might slightly impact the restaurant industry and indirectly reduce their profit margin by 0.1%
Americans would rather chuck perfectly good food into a dumpster than entertain the possibility of summoning the collective fucking will to fix a VERY straightforward problem. The idea that they could just legislate some reasonable liability protections and make sure edible food gets to hungry people apparently requires a level of imagination and civic competence beyond anyone’s wildest dream. So much easier to blame “some asshole” for creating what is surely an insurmountable legal paradox. The food rots, needy people go hungry, and the US gets to pretend the problem is some unavoidable fact of life rather than admit they just couldn’t be arsed to try.
In my limited experience (I found a succulent leaf on the street) the only skill one would need is to remind themselves to water it, like once a week maybe. All you have to do is drop it into a pot with some soil and water it every now and then. Maybe some succulents are more finicky though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*Also, it’s pretty cool to watch. Like the original leaf slowly shrinks and dries out as the new leaves are formed.
Yeah, I’ve got a couple succulents, and leaves will fall off and propagate on their own in the pot pretty often. All they really have to do is fall stem-side down into the dirt and it’ll grow roots and form a new plant. I just gave my buddy a small jade plant that grew from my larger plant that was originally itself a small auto-propagation from my dad’s plant.
I have succulents on my balcony that outgrow their pots. I break off chunks long enough to have a few root-hairs attached and drop them into the scruffy area at the side of the building. They can’t really root themselves there unless we get a bunch of rain, but I’ve seen a few people take one and it always makes me happy.
The skill involved for many plants is sticking it in the ground and leaving it to do its thing.
Ask the 5 kale plants on my bathroom window. Got to transfer them to individual pots at some point. Then see if I can get a few more cuttings to make some more. Not sure how many to grow, 10-20 probably but I still need to put up bird netting in the area I plan to put them.
To add on to this: a lot of customers are probably people who have the patience and skill to propogate. (As others have said, propagation isn’t really that hard, so it’s more about patience and time.) At the same time, if you have the patience and skill to propogate a plant and are still at a greenhouse buying plants, it’s probably because you’re specifically looking to buy a plant where someone has already done that work for you. You’re not going to proplift a plant instead of buying it, because you’re there specifically to buy something instead of doing that work.
Propagating plants and growing them from seeds is a longer process that’s prone to failure and can take time. It’s very common for gardeners to propogate/grow from seed some plants while also buying others that are already more mature in order to eliminate that process or because all their tomatoes this year died and they need new ones.
Sure, maybe every now and again you get someone who’s there to buy something else, sees a dropping from a plant they want that they might have otherwise bought, and grabs it, but as you said, that’s really not common enough to cut into their margins. You’re consistently paying for the saved time and effort when buying plants at greenhouses.
Now, if the greenhouse itself makes a habit of taking fallen plant bits to propogate new ones, that does change things a little bit, because you’re taking something they were going to use. But if it’s just going into the mulcher, who the fuck cares.
Stripping them off plants, yeah thats just damaging the plant itself and is shitty behaviour.
Off the ground? Now its crossing from damage into being pedantic about stuff that would go into a mulcher.
And I highly doubt that those with the patience and skill to propogate make up any significant margin whatsoever.
That’s the same sort of business owners who would throw away uneaten food in restaurants and not allow employees to take it home.
so major ones
The amount of perfectly OK cheesecake that looks barely damaged but can’t sell but can’t take home is very high. But my small town bakery, I can take the store home with me if there’s product leftover.
That’s different because it’s a liability thing. Some asshole would sue over bad food which means nobody gets the food.
They could donate the food to a food bank and be completely shielded from liability by Good Samaritan Act
They don’t want to because it means that poor people can eat for free (gasp) which might slightly impact the restaurant industry and indirectly reduce their profit margin by 0.1%
Americans would rather chuck perfectly good food into a dumpster than entertain the possibility of summoning the collective fucking will to fix a VERY straightforward problem. The idea that they could just legislate some reasonable liability protections and make sure edible food gets to hungry people apparently requires a level of imagination and civic competence beyond anyone’s wildest dream. So much easier to blame “some asshole” for creating what is surely an insurmountable legal paradox. The food rots, needy people go hungry, and the US gets to pretend the problem is some unavoidable fact of life rather than admit they just couldn’t be arsed to try.
In my limited experience (I found a succulent leaf on the street) the only skill one would need is to remind themselves to water it, like once a week maybe. All you have to do is drop it into a pot with some soil and water it every now and then. Maybe some succulents are more finicky though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*Also, it’s pretty cool to watch. Like the original leaf slowly shrinks and dries out as the new leaves are formed.
Yeah, I’ve got a couple succulents, and leaves will fall off and propagate on their own in the pot pretty often. All they really have to do is fall stem-side down into the dirt and it’ll grow roots and form a new plant. I just gave my buddy a small jade plant that grew from my larger plant that was originally itself a small auto-propagation from my dad’s plant.
I have succulents on my balcony that outgrow their pots. I break off chunks long enough to have a few root-hairs attached and drop them into the scruffy area at the side of the building. They can’t really root themselves there unless we get a bunch of rain, but I’ve seen a few people take one and it always makes me happy.
The skill involved for many plants is sticking it in the ground and leaving it to do its thing.
Ask the 5 kale plants on my bathroom window. Got to transfer them to individual pots at some point. Then see if I can get a few more cuttings to make some more. Not sure how many to grow, 10-20 probably but I still need to put up bird netting in the area I plan to put them.
To add on to this: a lot of customers are probably people who have the patience and skill to propogate. (As others have said, propagation isn’t really that hard, so it’s more about patience and time.) At the same time, if you have the patience and skill to propogate a plant and are still at a greenhouse buying plants, it’s probably because you’re specifically looking to buy a plant where someone has already done that work for you. You’re not going to proplift a plant instead of buying it, because you’re there specifically to buy something instead of doing that work.
Propagating plants and growing them from seeds is a longer process that’s prone to failure and can take time. It’s very common for gardeners to propogate/grow from seed some plants while also buying others that are already more mature in order to eliminate that process or because all their tomatoes this year died and they need new ones.
Sure, maybe every now and again you get someone who’s there to buy something else, sees a dropping from a plant they want that they might have otherwise bought, and grabs it, but as you said, that’s really not common enough to cut into their margins. You’re consistently paying for the saved time and effort when buying plants at greenhouses.
Now, if the greenhouse itself makes a habit of taking fallen plant bits to propogate new ones, that does change things a little bit, because you’re taking something they were going to use. But if it’s just going into the mulcher, who the fuck cares.