Page 91 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Vorax

the dreaded status of having nothing—but, owing perhaps to a
residual empathy programmed into their psyches, felt obliged to be
charitable toward the wretched of the earth. The result? Sporadic
outpourings of aid following natural disasters and refugee-generating
conflicts, lasting long enough to assuage guilt but too brief and
unreliable to assure the long-term assistance necessary to get the
unfortunates back on their feet and eking out a living.
Avery Goodman knew how to use that dynamic productively, and
he spent his modest bankroll on setting up a pilot program in a large
city with a good supply of both classes of people, relatively rich and
absolutely poor. The expense was in publicity, infrastructure and
customized software for a database and self-adhesive standard labels
easily affixed to any surface. It worked like this: almost every canned
or dry packaged comestible was sold imprinted with a use-by date.
And those were precisely the foodstuffs people stored away for
emergencies; the government regularly urged the populace to be
prepared for earthquakes, floods and terrorist attacks, publishing lists
of survival gear including sealed containers of beans, crackers,
preserved fruit and beverages. The usual outcome was a fitful
shopping binge after a well-publicized catastrophe. Then those goods
would sit around, out of sight and mind, until well past their
expiration date and would need to be discarded.
The hallmark of Goodman’s plan was that all parties involved
derived some benefit. From the point of purchase—say, a
supermarket—the buyer would take his shopping bag of back-up
food items to one of several reception/distribution centers; that
function could be added easily to existing locations for recycling
household, office and construction waste. There the receipt and
goods destined for emergency supplies would be scanned and
recorded for return no later than six months prior to the expiration
date. A list of those goods and a set of labels linking each item to its
price and return date would be given to the buyer to affix to the can,
bag or box for reference. Goodman would send the purchaser a
reminder ahead of the return date, at which time the unopened items
would be taken back to the processing site and exchanged for a
receipt entitling the donor to the full original purchase price as a tax-
deductible charitable contribution. Next, Goodman would donate
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