Let's Talk Carrots

There is a great story from World War II that tells how the British were able to shoot down German aircraft because of a secret weapon: carrots.

When the Nazis began heavily bombing London in September 1940, the British ordered a blackout at night and began fighting back by sending up fighters to intercept the Nazi bombers before they could reach the English Channel.  “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham was the first British pilot to shoot down an enemy bomber at night, going on to rack up twenty confirmed kills, all but one of which were downed in the dark.  Naturally, the public wanted to know how.

The Ministry of Information eagerly responded that the reason the RAF pilots were so successful was from the Vitamin A they received from eating carrots.  Almost immediately, the Ministry of Food began using carrots to promote victory gardens to supplement the meager amount of rationed food available.  A bespectacled Dr. Carrot told children it was their patriotic duty to weed those gardens.

During the war years, when sugar was rationed to eight ounces per adult per week, folks got creative, and they got creative fast. Carrot pudding, carrot cake, carrot marmalade, and even carrot flan leaned on plain old root-vegetable sweetness to do the job the sugar bowl couldn’t.  And if that still didn’t scratch the itch, you could always pour yourself a glass of carrolade—a juice made from rutabagas and carrots and proof that when dessert is a morale issue, people will find a way (even if it involves drinking something that sounds like it ought to be used to clean a basement drain).

For the record, carrots won’t turn you into a human lighthouse. The whole “eat carrots and you’ll see in the dark” thing was less Grandma’s folk wisdom and more wartime storytelling: carrots do contain beta-carotene, which your body can use to make vitamin A, and vitamin A is important for normal vision, especially if you’re deficient.  But if you’re already eating like a reasonably functional mammal, adding extra carotene doesn’t bolt on night-vision goggles—it just gives you a respectable carrot crunch and, in super-sufficient quantities, it will bless you with the sort of orange complexion that makes people ask if you’re over doing the spray-on tan.

There is no doubt that carrots are good for you, but Cat’s Eyes Johnson didn’t rely on vegetables to shoot down those planes:  his interceptor had a new secret weapon—radar.  In 1940, the British began putting Airborne Interception (AI) radar into night fighters.  The early radar gave the crews a crude “blip” for a target’s range and rough direction; controllers on the ground would then “talk the fighter in”, using Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) until he was within two or three miles, at which point the onboard radar would guide the pilot close enough to finally see the bomber in the dark and make the attack.  These early radar sets were primitive, fussy, and absolutely game-changing for night defense during the Blitz.

The carefully crafted stories about carrots’ benefits unquestionably fooled British civilians, and the idea that carrots were good for the eyes absolutely became one of those bits of nonsense that everyone knows is true.  But it certainly did not fool the Germans, who were already experimenting with their own radar sets.  After all, the Germans could certainly see those massive radar antennas that were erected along the Cliffs of Dover.  Apocryphal stories of the Germans suddenly feeding their pilots more carrots should be filed in the same open-top cylindrical filing cabinet where we keep Bigfoot sightings and UFO reports.

For me, the most interesting part of the story is asking why the Ministry of Information thought fooling its own citizens was necessary in the first place.  All the Allies and all the Axis countries knew the truth, so why couldn’t the citizens be trusted with the truth? 

There’s yet another carrot story, and it’s a whole lot more fun than wartime marmalade.  If you’ve ever wondered how Bugs Bunny wound up leaning on a carrot like it was a cigarette, and tossing out “What’s up, Doc?” like he’s got an appointment with your optometrist, the trail runs straight through a 1934 movie called, It Happened One Night.

That film was a cultural crowbar.  It didn’t just entertain—it rearranged furniture.  It helped define the screwball-comedy genre, it shocked the Academy by sweeping the five major Oscars, and it generated more “everybody knows” trivia than a barroom on movie night.

The most famous example is Clark Gable undressing and revealing he’s not wearing an undershirt: a moment that’s been credited—sometimes a little too confidently—with sending undershirt sales into a nosedive.  The basic story is widely repeated, but the dramatic “75% drop” figure is closer to legend than to something you can audit with receipts, which is, honestly, the most Hollywood thing imaginable.

Then there’s the bus trip.  The movie put Gable and Claudette Colbert on a Greyhound and later writers have credited the film with giving intercity bus travel a real bump in popularity: romance, comedy, and the open road, all for the price of a ticket and a seatmate who sings?  That’s certainly remotely possible but it’s also patently unprovable.

Now, here’s where the carrots hop back onto the stage. A fast-talking character named Oscar Shapely keeps calling Gable’s character “Doc,” Gable mentions an imaginary tough guy named “Bugs Dooley” to rattle him, and there’s a scene where Gable munches a carrot while talking rapidly—a bit of business that Warner Bros. animators later admitted was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny.

But, just to keep the record straight: the line “What’s up, Doc?” itself wasn’t cribbed from Capra’s script.  It was written for Bugs in 1940 (A Wild Hare), and Tex Avery, the director, later said it was just a common Texas-style greeting—“doc” meaning something like “pal” or “dude.”  So, yes, Bugs borrowed the carrot-chewing swagger from Clark Gable, but the catchphrase came right out of Texas, not from a Hollywood soundstage.

Now, here’s the punchline to this whole Bugs Bunny business: a cartoon rabbit leaning on a carrot like it’s a cigar is basically where half the English-speaking world learned “rabbit nutrition”—and it’s about as reliable as learning automotive repair from Wile E. Coyote.  Real rabbits don’t naturally live on sugary root vegetables and carrots are best treated like dessert—small, occasional, and not the main event.   A steady diet of carrots will actually kill a rabbit.  If you want to feed a rabbit something “carrot-ish” on the regular, the top green part is the better bet: carrot tops are a leafy green that fits the “salad” side of a rabbit diet, while the orange part belongs in the once-in-a-blue moon treat category. 

Any good dietitian will tell you that you are safer taking dietary advice from Popeye than from Bugs.

Okay, that’s enough!  Next week I’ll explain how the S.S. Minnow was a Wheeler Express Cruiser with a top cruising speed of only 12 knots, so Gilligan and the rest of the castaways were never more than 41 miles from Oahu.  Geez, it’s like you can’t believe Hollywood at all

Is That Inflation?

Growing up, I learned that “prices went up” is one of those phrases people use the way they use “The dog ate my homework.”  That’s a catch-all excuse that explains everything and therefore explains nothing.  It’s a little like saying, “History happened.” 

But if you listen to the public conversation long enough, you’ll notice that we jam at least three different ideas into that one phrase:

• A plain old price increase (the thing you buy got more expensive),
• A relative price change (the thing you buy got more expensive compared with other things), and
• Systemic inflation (damn near everything went up).

And because we treat these as interchangeable, we end up arguing past each other like two professors who are debating whether Plato would have liked TikTok.  (He would not.  He’d have published a dialogue about it and then banned it.)

So, let’s untangle this, and do it with enough humor to keep your blood pressure below “breaking news.”

“Prices Went Up”: The Great American Catch-All.  When someone says, “Prices are up,” they might mean one price is up.  Like eggs.  Or gasoline.  Or the kind of coffee beans that now require a co-signer.  That’s a price increase—often caused by something specific: drought, war, shipping snarls, avian flu, or a mysterious shortage of whatever it is my grandson collects.

A price increase is usually local to a product, or a small set of products, and it often has an identifiable, concrete cause.  The price rose because something got scarcer, or demand surged, or a regulator woke up feeling ambitious, or some jackass in California discovered that if you ate a half-ton of it within a single week it caused cancer.   In other words: a price increase is a micro story.  It’s just about that thing.

This is different from inflation, which is the macro story.  Inflation is when the overall purchasing power of money declines, and a broad swath of prices rise—goods, services, and finally and a little later, wages.

So, the first key distinction is:

• Price increase: “This thing costs more.”
• Inflation: “Money buys less across the economy, and it keeps doing that for a while.”

If you want a quick gut-check:  if only a few items are spiking, you’re likely looking at price increases and relative price changes.  If everything is creeping up, and it won’t stop creeping, you might be dealing with systemic inflation.

Relative Prices: The Ratio That Ruins Your Dinner Plans.  Now let’s talk about relative price changes, which are the economic equivalent of your neighbor buying a new pickup: the problem isn’t the truck; it’s what it does to the neighborhood pecking order.

A relative price is the price of one thing compared to other things.  Economists love ratios because ratios don’t care about your feelings.  So, when we say “beef got expensive,” what we often mean in practice is: beef got expensive relative to chicken.  Suddenly chicken starts looking more attractive, and beef starts looking like something you buy only on anniversaries, funerals, and when your brother-in-law is trying to impress someone.

Relative price changes are important because they change behavior.  People substitute:

·      Chicken for beef,

·      Store-brand for name-brand,

·      “Maybe we don’t need a new bigger iPad” for “fine, I’ll just keep squinting.”

This is not “inflation” in the big, systemic sense.  It’s the economy doing what it does: rearranging who buys what, and at what price.  The prices of goods relative to other goods are constantly changing.  It might be disconcerting, but it is normal.

Episodic Price Increases: The Price Spike With a Plot Twist.  Now we add a wrinkle: episodic price increases.  “Episodic” isn’t about whether something is expensive compared to other things.  It’s about the shape over time.  An episodic price increase looks like this:

·      A spike,

·      A surge,

·      A brief moment of panic,

·      Then a leveling off, and sometimes a partial retreat.

Think gasoline after a refinery outage.  Think eggs during an avian flu wave.  Think airfare around the holidays when airlines decide to test the outer limits of human patience.

So: Episodic price increase is a description of timing (“it jumped in a burst”).  Relative price change is a description of comparison (“it rose compared to other prices”).  These can overlap, but they don’t have to.  You can have an episodic spike that changes relative prices, or you can have a broader inflation flare where lots of prices rise together, leaving relative prices mostly unchanged.

Inflation: When the Whole Price Level Decides to Get Ideas.  Now we get to the big evil one: systemic inflation.  Inflation isn’t just “prices are higher.”  It’s persistent, broad-based increases in the general price level.  A classic feature of systemic inflation is that it tends to show up across many categories:

·      Goods,

·      Services,

·      Housing costs,

·      And anything else that makes you ask, “Is that what I used to pay?”

Inflation often involves feedback loops:  Businesses raise prices because costs are rising and they expect others to raise prices, and then, workers ask for higher wages because the cost of living is up, and next, higher wages push up costs for labor-intensive services, till finally, prices rise again restarting the entire cycle.

That’s not a single product’s story…that’s a whole economy’s story.  And here’s the part people forget: inflation is a rate, not a level.  If prices jump once and then stabilize, you can end up with high prices, but with low inflation (it’s expensive, but it’s not getting more expensive every few weeks).

This is why you can hear someone say, “Inflation is down!” and hear someone else shout, “Then why is everything still so expensive?!” and both can be right.  The first person is talking about the rate of price increase.  The second is staring at the new, higher level of prices like it personally insulted their retirement plan.

Tariffs: The Political Version of “Hold My Beer”.   Now to the big question:  If prices increase because of tariffs, is that not inflation?  The most honest answer is, “usually not”, at least not by definition—but a tariff can contribute, depending on how it plays out.  A tariff is a policy that raises the cost of imported goods (and sometimes key inputs), which often raises the prices of:

·      The tariffed imported items,

·      Domestic substitutes because producers can now charge more,

·      And downstream products that use those imports as inputs.

That’s first and foremost a relative price change:  the tariffed goods become more expensive relative to other goods.  It can also be a one-time increase in the overall price level if it hits a meaningful chunk of the consumer basket.  But here’s the key:  a one-time increase in the price level is not automatically a self-sustaining inflation process.  Whether it becomes “systemic inflation” depends on breadth, persistence, and reinforcement.

Tariffs look more like “a price shock” when:

·      The tariff is narrow (a few products)

·      People can substitute away easily

·      Firms absorb some of the cost by lowering margins

·      The central bank doesn’t “accommodate” it by letting overall demand run hot

·      Wages and broad pricing expectations don’t spiral

That scenario gives you:  “These things got pricier.”  Annoying.  Very real.  But not necessarily systemic inflation.

Tariffs can feed inflation when:  They’re broad and large, they hit key inputs across industries, they raise costs for lots of businesses at once, businesses start raising prices more generally “because everybody is,” and workers bargain for higher wages to keep up.  At that point, tariffs can become part of a broader inflation story, not because tariffs are “inflation,” but because they can act like a cost shock that spreads and gets reinforced.

So, the best way to say it is: Tariffs are not “inflation” by definition.  They are a policy-driven cost shock and a relative-price change.  But they can show up in inflation measures, and in some conditions, they can contribute to inflation persistence.

Perhaps an example would help.  If America imported all the widgets needed for manufacturing and every industry used them, a tariff on widgets would be inflationary.  But, if manufacturers could substitute American made flanges for imported widgets, or it spurs domestic production of widgets at a competitive price, this is not inflationary as the cost of production is only temporarily increased.

This is all very confusing, so let’s put that into A Field Guide for Normal People.

If you want to decide what you’re looking at in real life, try this:

Is it broad?  If only a few categories are jumping, it’s likely price increases and relative price changes.  If lots of categories are rising, especially services, inflation is more likely.

Is it persistent?  If it spikes and then settles, think episodic.  If it keeps rolling month after month, think systemic.

Are wages chasing it?  Broad inflation often involves wages rising too (even if they lag).  A narrow price shock often doesn’t.

Can you substitute away?  If you can dodge the pain by switching products, it’s often a relative-price story.  If everything you switch to is also climbing, you’re in inflation territory.

Conclusion: Words Matter, Because Wallets Matter.  So, yes, “prices went up” is true in the same way “water is wet” is true.  But if we want to be precise (and occasionally sane), we should ask:

·      Is this a price increase in a particular market?

·      Is it a relative price change changing what people buy?

·      Is it an episodic spike tied to a specific shock?

·      Or is it systemic inflation, where the general price level rises broadly and persistently?

And if the culprit is tariffs, we can say that tariffs typically create relative price changes and often a one-time bump in some prices, and sometimes in the overall price level.  Whether that becomes systemic inflation depends on whether it spreads, sticks, and gets reinforced by expectations, wage dynamics, and overall demand.

In other words, tariffs are not automatically inflationary—they’re more like the economic equivalent of tossing a wrench into the machine and then acting surprised when the machine makes a new noise.

Which, come to think of it, describes a lot of public policy.

The Wellerman

If you spend more than fifteen minutes browsing the internet, you are likely to find a video of large, bearded baritones thumping a table while singing an old sea shanty, “The Wellerman.”  It’s a catchy tune, but some of the historical references are obscure.  Obscure historical terms are my métier. 

The lyrics of “Wellerman” first lumbered into writing not in some brine-soaked 1830s logbook, but in the late twentieth century, when New Zealand folk collector Neil Colquhoun wrote down a version he heard from Frank R. Woods of Wairoa—a man who obligingly remembered the song but neglected to remember who wrote it.  This is why the song lives in that legal limbo beloved of folk music, where everything is “traditional,” nobody gets a royalty check, and copyright lawyers begin to sweat.  It might preserve scraps of an older whaling song, or it might be a comparatively modern composition with antique manners; the evidence is as thin as boarding house soup, the paper trail begins suspiciously late, and by the time anyone thought to ask, the author was either dead, fictional, or had wandered off with the sugar, tea, and rum.  As a result, Wellerman remains uncopyrighted in spirit (if not always in performance), floating serenely between the nineteenth century and TikTok, owned by everyone and no one at all.

It is not at all clear whether my quoting one version of the lyrics here is a copyright violation.  With that in mind, let me make it abundantly clear that I am NOT the author of any version of the song (most particularly the one I quote here).  If pressed, I’m not even sure if I am the author of this blog.

“Soon May the Wellerman Come” (usually just shortened to “Wellerman”) is a New Zealand folk song about the shore-whaling world of the early 1800s.  In modern pop culture it’s usually called a sea shanty, but it’s better described as a sea song/ballad (something you sing about maritime life, rather than a strict work-song timed to hauling).  In the age of sail, hauling was rarely a one-person job.  Dozens of sailors would pull together on the same line and timing mattered—everyone had to lean back and pull at the same moment.

That’s where work songs came in. A strict hauling song (a true sea shanty) has a strong, regular beat or call-and-response pattern so the crew knows exactly when to pull.  The shantyman sings a line, the crew answers, and everyone hauls on the beat.  If the timing was off, the work slowed—or someone got hurt.

So, let’s take the song a verse at a time.

There once was a ship that put to sea
The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea
The winds blew up, her bow dipped down
O blow, my bully boys, blow (Huh!)

In New Zealand, the whaling season generally began in late autumn to early winter—around May or June—and ran through spring, or roughly October.  It is therefore the 1830s, and a whaling ship with the highly improbable name “Billy o’ Tea” has put to sea in foul winter weather, crewed by what the song cheerfully calls bully boys—that is, sturdy, high-spirited sailors, with bully meaning “fine” or “excellent,” not men inclined to steal lunch money.  A billy, for those unfamiliar with antipodean slang, is a metal pot used to boil water for tea, which means the vessel’s name translates more or less to “the Teapot.”  If we take the shanty at its word, this is almost certainly a nickname rather than a christened name, as there is no historical evidence for a whaling ship formally registered under anything quite that ridiculous.

After every verse comes the chorus, but I’ll just show it this one time:

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguin' is done
We'll take our leave and go

The chorus shifts the scene from danger to anticipation, as the crew looks shoreward rather than seaward and pins its hopes on the arrival of the Wellerman, the supply agent associated with the Weller brothers’ New Zealand whaling network, sort of an ocean-going grocery store that sold supplies to the whaling ships.  “Soon may the Wellerman come” is less a prediction than a prayer: the men are stuck in the grim, oily business of “tonguing”—the nasty job of cutting blubber into strips for rendering—and morale depends on the promise that, once the gory work is finished, relief will arrive.  The refrain is not a hauling song but a waiting song, sung by men whose work cannot be hurried, only endured, and who know that supplies, not heroics, will decide how tolerable the season becomes.

The promised comforts—sugar, tea, and rum—were not luxuries in the modern sense but psychological necessities in an isolated, freezing, and monotonous world.  Sugar turned bitter tea drinkable, tea itself provided warmth and routine, and rum (usually diluted with water into grog) offered both calories and the temporary forgetfulness of drunken stupor.  These items were small, lightweight, and easily traded, making them ideal shipborne currency, and their mention in the chorus is telling: the crew does not dream of gold or glory, only of sweetened tea, a warm buzz, and a brief return to civilization before the next whale appears offshore.

She'd not been two weeks from shore
When down on her, a right whale bore
The captain called all hands and swore
He'd take that whale in tow (Huh!)

The second verse brings the song abruptly back to business.  Barely “two weeks from shore,” the lookout spots a right whale, the very species whalers most wanted, and the captain immediately commits to the chase.  The verse compresses into a few lines what was, in reality, a carefully choreographed plan of attack: boats lowered, gear readied, orders shouted, and every man was suddenly alert.  There is nothing romantic here—this is a calculated decision driven by economics.  A right whale meant oil, baleen, wages, and justification for the risks already taken by sailing out in winter seas.

Baleen—often misleadingly called whalebone—was the plastic of the nineteenth century, a tough, flexible form of keratin that grew in comb-like plates from the upper jaws of baleen whales such as the right whale.  Light, resilient, and springy, it could be cut, shaped, and bent, making it indispensable for corset stays, hoop skirts, umbrella ribs, buggy whips, and countless everyday goods in an age before synthetics.  By the mid-1800s, high-quality baleen could fetch several dollars per pound—a substantial sum at the time—and on a single large whale the baleen alone might exceed the value of the oil rendered from its blubber.  That economic reality explains why a cry of “right whale!” instantly transformed a cold, miserable season into a moment of grim opportunity: the whale was not just meat and oil, but a floating cargo of the era’s most versatile industrial material.

The choice of a right whale is historically correct.  Right whales were slow-moving, migrated close to shore during the New Zealand winter, and—crucially—tended to float when killed, making them “right” from a whaler’s brutally practical point of view.  For shore-based stations and near-coastal ships, they were ideal prey: large enough to be worth the effort, predictable enough to plan around, and valuable enough to sustain an entire season.  The verse’s casual tone masks a grim reality—once the whale is sighted, the season’s waiting ends, and the real danger begins.   (If this distresses you, it might be comforting to know that no nation currently hunts right whales, they are protected by several international treaties.)

Before the boat had hit the water
The whale's tail came up and caught her
All hands to the side, harpooned and fought her
When she dived down low (Huh!)

This verse cheerfully dispenses with suspense and dives straight into catastrophe: the boats are dropped, the men pull hard, and almost immediately the whale reminds everyone who is in charge by bringing its tail down like an airborne barn door.  In song logic, this happens in about three seconds, which neatly skips the screaming, rowing, and horror that usually preceded such moments.  Historically, this is perfectly plausible—whales did smash boats, flip them, stove them in, and occasionally scatter sailors like loose cutlery—but the verse presents it with the impending horror of a twister approaching a trailer park.  One moment the crew is confident, the next they are airborne, wet, and reconsidering their career choices.  It’s a harsh reminder that in whaling narratives, the whale always gets to land the first punch.

No line was cut, no whale was freed
The Captain's mind was not of greed
But he belonged to the whaleman's creed
She took that ship in tow (Huh!)

The following verse is where the song leaves history and dives into heroic nonsense: despite danger, exhaustion, and every sensible instinct screaming otherwise, no line is cut and the captain absolutely refuses to quit.  In real whaling, cutting the line was a standard survival technique, not an act of cowardice—better to lose a whale than a boat, a crew, or one’s internal organs—but folk songs are written by survivors, not by safety officers.  Here the captain becomes a symbol of stubborn resolve, the sort of man who would rather be dragged to the ends of the earth than admit defeat, while the crew loyally clings on and hopes the line holds.  It’s less a documentary moment than a moral lesson delivered at sea: true grit is measured not by good judgment, but by how long you can ignore it before something expensive breaks.

For forty days, or even more
The line went slack, then tight once more
All boats were lost, there were only four
But still that whale did go (Huh!)

The next verse totally abandons history altogether and plunges into the realm of epic exaggeration, announcing that the struggle lasted “forty days or even more,” which is roughly thirty-nine days longer than any whale, crew, rope, or ship could reasonably tolerate.  Real hunts took hours, sometimes a very bad day, but never a biblical testing period complete with slack lines, taut lines, and the gradual disappearance of boats.  This is folk-song timekeeping at its finest, where endurance replaces chronology and suffering is measured in round numbers.  By the end of the verse the ship is somehow still afloat, most of its boats are gone, and everyone involved has achieved legendary status simply by not drowning—proof that when sailors tell stories, duration expands in direct proportion to discomfort and distance from the nearest bottle of rum.

As far as I've heard, the fight's still on
The line's not cut and the whale's not gone
The Wellerman makes his regular call
To encourage the Captain, crew, and all (Huh!)

The final verse cheerfully waves goodbye to time, logic, and maritime accounting, insisting that the fight is somehow still going on while the Wellerman continues to show up on schedule like a dependable delivery service in the middle of an ongoing disaster.  At this point the whale has become less an animal than a plot device, eternally towing the ship while supplies arrive as if nothing unusual were happening.  Historically, this is nonsense, but narratively, it’s perfect.  The verse turns the whole affair into folklore, where the real struggle is no longer with the whale but with boredom, hunger, and the faint hope that someone will eventually bring tea, sugar, and rum before the song itself finally runs out of breath.

By this point, you are probably comparing Wellerman to Moby-Dick—and it is hard not to.  The song is set in the whaling world of the 1830s, while Melville published his novel in 1851.  Was the song written first?  Probably not, though the evidence is thin enough that no one can prove it either way.  The one certainty is this: listening to Wellerman requires far less of your life than reading Moby-Dick.

Coffee Cans, Pickup Trucks, and the Slow March of Shrinkflation

When I was growing up in Texas, every family had a pickup truck.  Long before I ever had a driver’s license, I knew how to handle “three on the tree,” and I knew that the lug nuts on the driver’s side of Dodge pickups had reverse threads.  I also knew that the glove compartment held a flashlight, and I knew that under the seat you could find a lug wrench, a bumper jack, and—wedged into the seat springs—a coffee can containing a roll of toilet paper.

To be completely honest, that can also contained a handful of napkins and a couple of books of matches.  Every truck had that coffee can.  When my wife and I bought an old ’63 Ford pickup back in 1973, it came with such a can already under the seat.  Hell, the automakers should have made it standard equipment.

So, when my boys—What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One—recently each bought themselves a new pickup, I thought I would send them the essential equipment needed for any proper truck.  Not jumper cables.  Not a tire gauge.  That coffee can.  The rest they can figure out for themselves.

It turns out I can’t.  They don’t make that coffee can anymore!

If we go back to the late 1800s, coffee was sold in whatever quantity you wanted.  The clerk would pull the beans from a wooden barrel, scooping out a pound, and pouring them into a sack.  Some stores roasted and ground the beans for you, or you could take them home and roast them yourself (usually badly).

In 1890, John Arbuckle began selling pre-roasted coffee—Arbuckle’s Ariosa—in paper bags.  It didn’t take long for competitors to follow suit and begin roasting coffee commercially.  There was, however, a problem:  Once roasted, coffee beans immediately begin to lose flavor when exposed to air.

Hills Bros. solved that problem around 1900 by selling coffee in vacuum-sealed one-pound steel cans.  This innovation is widely credited as the beginning of modern coffee packaging and paved the way for the standard one pound can that dominated American grocery shelves for most of the 20th century.  (If you are wondering, Arbuckle—once the largest coffee company in the world—continued selling coffee in paper bags and was eventually eclipsed by competitors.  History is cruel that way.)

And that’s how things stayed for roughly seventy years.  You bought coffee in one-, two-, or three-pound cans, opened them with a key, and when the coffee was gone, the can went to work holding nails, loose change, toy soldiers, marbles, or a roll of toilet paper destined for truck duty.  It is no exaggeration to say there may have been people who drank coffee primarily to acquire that steel can.

Once opened, of course, the freshness of the coffee began an immediate and irreversible decline.  There was no factory-supplied reseal.  People improvised with wax paper, folded cardboard, saucers, rubber bands, or simply left the can open and hoped for the best.  Freshness was… aspirational.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, coffee companies began including free snap-on plastic lids to reseal the cans—an idea most prominently associated with Maxwell House and quickly copied by Folgers and everyone else.  Even now, I would wager that one of those plastic lids is lurking in your kitchen junk drawer.

Then came the inflationary 1970s, when the price of everything rose sharply.  By the end of the decade, the price of coffee had increased by roughly 40 percent, and the bean counters at the coffee companies began to worry.  Would consumers balk at higher prices? Would sticker shock kill sales?

The answer was no.  Coffee is what economists call an inelastic good.  If you are dependent on caffeine, you will buy your morning cup of coffee even if it requires selling your children to pharmaceutical companies for product testing.  Cigarettes, coffee, insulin, and water are all inelastic goods—the quantity demanded doesn’t change much when prices rise.  Consumers might change brands, but they don’t quit.

So… Instead of raising prices too visibly, coffee companies made the one pound can just a little smaller.  Sixteen ounces quietly became fourteen and a half.  Keep the can looking familiar, make it slightly thinner, and hope no one notices.

This kind of thievery—I mean marketing—is called, “shrinkflation”.  Candy bars, cereal boxes, laundry detergent, toilet paper rolls, potato chips—you name it—we got less of it for the same price.  Almost overnight, the half-gallon tub of ice cream was replaced by the 1.5-quart tub.  This is also when advertisers discovered phrases like “convenient size” and “portion control.” (The latter roughly translates to, “we want credit for your self-restraint.”)

The truly ironic part is that coffee wasn’t actually getting more expensive in real terms.  While inflation raised prices, it also raised wages.  Measured in hours worked, coffee became cheaper.  In 1970, a minimum-wage worker needed about 28 minutes of labor to buy a pound of coffee.  In 1980, it took only about 20 minutes.  Shrinkflation was deployed to fight the perception of higher prices, not the reality.

Shrinkflation didn’t stop, of course.  By the mid-1980s, the can had shrunk again, to about 13 ounces, accompanied by cheerful announcements about “packaging efficiency” and “improved roasting.” While roasting technology has improved over the last half-century, those improvements are about consistency and cost control, not about taste.

By the early 1990s, rising steel prices doomed the classic can altogether.  In its place came the 11.5-ounce plastic “Aromaseal” container.  To disguise the smaller size, the plastic was molded with deep finger dents—because who doesn’t remember how impossible it was to pick up a one-pound metal coffee can?

Within a decade, coffee began appearing in “canisters,” meaning cardboard tubes marketed as environmentally friendly.  They are not.  The interior of those canisters is lined with a metallicized aluminum-polymer barrier bonded with industrial adhesive.  They are no more recyclable than the plastic containers they replaced.

Nor is the latest incarnation any better.  Coffee is now commonly sold in 10-ounce foil bags.  It took 130 years, but we’ve come full circle: we’re back to buying coffee in bags, just like John Arbuckle sold.  The difference is that Arbuckle’s bags were paper, while modern “foil bags” are laminated composites—plastic films, metallicized aluminum layers, inner plastic sealants, inks, and adhesives that are chemically bonded

together.  After a century in a landfill, all they’ll get is dirty.

I have a modest proposal.  Let’s go back to the steel one-pound coffee can.  When I eventually tire of using it to store nuts and bolts, I can recycle it—because nothing is more recyclable than steel.  Yes, it will cost more than a 10-ounce bag of coffee.  I don’t mind.

And you don’t even have to give me a plastic lid.  I still have one.

So when my boys ask why their brand-new pickups don’t have that coffee can under the seat, I’m tempted to tell them it’s because modern trucks are more “efficient.”  Lighter.  Streamlined.  Optimized.  All the words we use when something useful quietly disappears.  They’ve got heated seats, backup cameras, and dashboards that look like flight simulators, but they don’t have a place for a roll of toilet paper and a book of matches.  Progress, I suppose.