A Country of Excess and Wastage

In this age of global warming it is frightening to see how developed countries like United States mega maniacal style over-indulgence.

I walked into a store like Macy’s in the afternoon to do some window shopping and what I saw was a handful of customers but the 100,000 sq. ft. store was fully lighted and all their escalators were operating. What I did not understand was why were they not following some energy saving measures. Why did they need to have their store so brightly lit for a few customers. This was the same story in all the other stores in the mall.

Next I wanted to buy bread and milk  so I walked into Safeway – another mega store for food. The store had mind-boggling variety of food items. The food items were over stacked with food items and most items had an expiry date. The close expiry date food was on sale offer and quite a few racks were full of these items. I am pretty sure that a lot of unsold food must be discarded and with multiple similar stores I cannot believe that all the items gets sold out in time. It will be interesting to know the percentage of discards for each store and calculate the carbon footprints.  Again while we are struggling with issues related to global warming – why are these stores not better organized  – do the Americans and others  need  to stack their super stores in the fashion that there is likely to be a famine or a war. Is this what these kind of free economies are preaching to  other economies when they talk about free trade etc. The result from the madness of competition is there for all to see  and if the rest of the world heads the same way then these economies  will eventually finish off our planet Earth with their over-indulgence and wastage.  

It is time that these countries get responsible and get some regulatory framework to avoid such huge wastage of power and food. If they do this it would greatly help this planet.