Have
you ever wondered about some of the small things you pick up in
a store?
Think
about a bottle of hot sauce. A jar of orange marmalade. A candy
bar.
There
are more than 4,500 Walmart stores in the United States. Just
shy of 2,000 Target locations. Depending on how you classify them,
most information resources say there are a minimum of 40,000 grocery
stores in the United States. And here’s an interesting thought…
Every
one of those places probably has a Kit Kat and a Twix for sale.
Every one has Smuckers jams and jellies. Every one of them has
Cholula and Tabasco.
Look,
my numbers and location inventory may not be perfect… but supplying
well over 50,000 buildings with your product is pretty impressive.
And we just wander in, expecting to grab some Tropicana orange
juice and Duracell AA batteries, as if there’s no possible chance
our store won’t have them.
Every
so often I’ll tune in to one of those programs that shows how
something is made or breaks down what goes into producing it.
And a lot of the time, there will be a funny claim made. Something
like:
“Every
year, fill-in-the-blank whips up enough marshmallows to circle
the Earth seventy-four thousand times.”
“Just
for special Halloween orders, fill-in-the-blank produces enough
pumpkin cream jack-o-lanterns to stretch from Earth to Mars
and halfway back.”
And
I always wonder the same thing. How?
How
do we produce even remotely enough sugar or gelatin or whatever
ingredients to be able to manufacture a side-by-side line of chocolate
covered anything that stretches hundreds of thousands to millions
of miles?
Seriously.
Skittles.
You know Skittles. Those bright, fruit flavored morsels that no
one east unless there’s no other candy around? There are claims
all over the internet that two-hundred-million are produced every
day. And, that rate of production would evidently create a connected
line all the way to the moon.
Skittles.
Earth to Moon.
Oh,
and they aren’t alone. Annual Tootsie Roll production apparently
will stretch Earth to Moon and back.
I
wonder if I’ve raked enough leaves to stretch to the Moon. You
know, not seasonally or annually. Lifetime.
For
more than a decade, Terry and I lived in a house with not a lot
of oak trees… not dozens of oak trees… there were hundreds of
oak trees in and surrounding our yard. The annual arrival of autumn
was celebrated by a blanket of leaves falling on our property
that needed to be cleaned up. (And blanket of leaves should be
viewed as a deep covering, across the entire yard.)
Let’s
say the average leaf is three-inches wide, just to be fair. And
if I can get like ten to twelve into every sweep with the rake,
that means three feet of leaves, and…
Ok,
look, the math is for a lifetime of yardwork. I have to be closer
in leaves to the Moon than I think. (I’m just saying, the Moon
averages shy of two-hundred-forty-thousand miles from our planet.
Over my lifetime, the combined miles I’ve driven far exceeds there
and back and there and more. Skittles and Tootsie Rolls are a
lot smaller than a leaf. It’s a doable distance.)
I
think the most surprising part of it is that more often than not,
when the distance game is played up in the marketing, it’s for
products I don’t use and don’t know that anyone does. (Seriously,
who buys Skittles?) Tell me it’s Kisses stretching to Pluto and
you’ll have me nodding as if that’s possible. (Come on, it is.
Think of all the awesome Christmas cookies that use Kisses. And
that’s just Christmas sales.)
And
all any of us care about is the supplies making it to our local
store. Heaven forbid the local market doesn’t have cinnamon rolls.
(Do
you think Coca-Cola produces enough soda each year to fill all
the pools in America? I know. It’s a thinker.)