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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael In Germany, many supermarkets carry these collapsable cargo boxes, and they usually cost about three or four Euros. Experienced shoppers carry them folded up in the trunks of their cars, and when they've pushed the shopping cart full of groceries back to their parking spot, they simply unfold the box, place the items in it, and have thus saved the environment from dealing with another plastic bag.
But these boxes are largely unknown in the United States. Angelika calls them "Curver Boxes", but those are different, as they're solid plastic and non-collapsable.
It must have been about 15 years ago, when I found a similar collapsable orange and black colored plastic box at the Daiso store, which is a Japanese dollar store in Daly City. I paid only 6 Dollars for it, first bought one, then another one, and every time I unfolded it at the register of Trader Joe's groceries, the cashiers were rubbing their eyes in disbelief and started marveling how smart the design was and if I could do it again, just for illustration purposes, fold, and unfold it, please?
This story continued, as I said before, for something like 10 or 15 years, but lately, the two boxes started to show their age and kept deteriorating slowly. I went back to Daiso, but they no longer carried the marvelous boxes. So I grudgingly glued my old broken boxes time and time again, until by sheer coincidence I saw a new, much more stable version of the box at Costco the other day. They called it "Clever Crates" and charged a whopping $12.89 for it. I immediately bought two, and hope that this new investment will pay off until year 2030 for all my groceries shopping. If you know your way around Costco, it's an open secret that everything in the store costs a certain dollar amount and 99 cents, but if you see merchandize priced at $xx.89, it means that it's an everything-must-go sale of a few remaining items. For heaven's sake, quick, go find your box at Costco, it's an opportunity that opens only once every 15 years!
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