My old friend, and former business partner, Dave Moses is conjuring magic from his closet during these unprecedented times. Oliver and I had front-row seats in the Zoom audience last night, and we emerged, truly, amazed: I have no idea how Dave did most of what he did.

If you’re looking for some socially distanced family fun, look no further: buy tickets here.

Shopping at Monsieur Vrac, the new zero waste general goods store next to Best Buy in West Royalty, is a pain in the ass.

That’s kind of the point.

Or at least it was the point driven home to me. 

All the futzing around with grease pencils (to mark product codes on bags and jars). All the scooping, filling, pumping. All the trying-to-figure-out-what-everything-is-from-the-tiny-labels. All the math and mass.

Combined, the point it all drives home is why we have packaging in the first place: it’s simply a lot easier to pick up a plastic container of roasted almonds from a rack, a container that has a price on it, and put it in your shopping cart than it is to find the right size glass jar, place it under the roasted almonds dispenser, unleash the trap door so that the almonds can flow, hope that the almonds don’t overflow all over the place, and hope that you haven’t mistakenly served yourself $25 of roasted almonds (or, in my case, $20.56 of vegan dark chocolate chips).

On my first visit, last night, my purchases ranged from 1 cent worth of coriander to $20.56 worth of the aforementioned chocolate; there are no itemized receipts provided, in keeping with the zero waste philosophy, but you are invited to take a photo of the display of the point of sale system; here’s mine:

Because of COVID-19, you’re not allowed to bring your own containers, leaving the only option to purchase glass jars (which cost between $1 and $2 each, depending on the size) or to use (free) paper bags (which, led to an embarrassing chocolate chip spill when the bag broke). The jars can be returned to the store for credit on your next order, so it’s not entirely an out-of-pocket cost; post-COVID, when we’ll be able to take our own containers, things will improve (although there will be the need to weigh containers before filling, which is another hill to climb).

Sharon Labchuk, founding leader of the Green Party of PEI, once talked on the radio about how it’s not that the things we consume on Prince Edward Island don’t consume energy and generate waste, it’s just that the energy and the waste, from creation and packaging both, is hidden from us, because it happens offshore; at M. Vrac we’re called to replace some of that energy with our own energy. In doing so, we make the hidden obvious, and I emerged, after 45 minutes of wandering and filling and labeling and (accidentally) spilling, with two shopping bags full of things I am going to either eat or use again, rather than throwing away.

All that said, I’m not sure whether I’ll go back to Monsieur Vrac: I’m completely on board with the philosophy, and seeing how much packaging I didn’t use was enlightening, but I wonder if I have it in me to bus my own tables week after week. I will try. I hope others will try. In the meantime, I have a lifetime supply of vegan 70% chocolate chips.

Oh, and one more new thing in the shop today. Perhaps the nichiest of niche products. But if you’ve an Evelyn in your life, it doesn’t get much better than this.

New in the letterpress goods shop this afternoon, a 2-month calendar for January and February 2021. Also accurate in 2027, 2038 and 2044.

Night Shift by Lucy Dacus.

My friend Peter writes about wrapping up his pants business:

I was quite grateful to our designer Cecilia for not mentioning early on that pants are pretty complex pieces of apparel with plenty of complications built in, and lots of variety in how they would be used. In other words, all bodies are different. (Sidebar: Let’s face it, legs are weird once you start thinking about them.)

I was one whose body was different enough to not have a pair of Zephyr pants that suited, so I know the truth of this (the curse of the Rukavina men: short of leg, talk of torso).

There’s a lot that rings true in Peter’s postmortem when I think about my own experience of running a physical goods shop for the last month.

There’s now an electric vehicle charger at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, which would have been a big help to use when Catherine was regularly receiving treatment there.

I’m hopeful that a charger will also be installed at the PEI Palliative Care Centre, a place where, I can attest from personal experience, the last thing you want to be worrying about is whether your car’s battery has enough juice to get you home.

Jessica Spengler on Christmas lights and neighbours:

When the sun goes down, I turn our Christmas lights on for us because they make our flat feel cozy. But I also turn them on for everyone else on the street, so when our neighbors look out their windows, they see something bright and pretty in the cold night. And when I look out my window and see the twinkling lights and candles and Christmas trees of our neighbors, I feel like they’re partially for us, too. We’re sending out little signals to say we’re here, and we know you’re there, and while we may all still be isolated and afraid, we see each other, and we care.

Everything I know about merchandising, including what the word itself means (“the activity of promoting the sale of goods, especially by their presentation in retail outlets”), I learned at Canadian Tire as a teenager. While my primary role there was selling Commodore VIC-20 computers, I received all the training that any floor staffer would, so I learned all about how to put English-language labels facing front, making sure there was always the appearance of products being fully in stock, and that Canadian Tire sells most of the Armour All in Canada.

All of which made me appreciate this floor display at The Bookmark even more.

After being out of stock for a week, Using Her Marbles is back in stock at The Bookmark.