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 #2 (permalink) Wed Jan 10, 2007 14:26 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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Good morning, Torsten
Well, there are a lot of things that have changed over the years but I can't say that anything has come as a total surprise because during my 17 years in Germany I visited the US regularly and my visits were generally not short ones.
Two things come to mind immediately, though:
- There is a lot more recycling done now than there was in the past. But it's still not comparable to the level of recycling done in Germany.
- The internet and high-tech are literally everywhere. I've noticed a number of changes at supermarkets in particular. Paying for groceries at the supermarket can now be done without a cashier (self check-out systems). You can also pay for your groceries using a debit card (which I'd never seen prior to moving to Germany). I still remember the days when you could only pay with cash or a check. In the local supermarket here, there is even a monitor and keyboard that is used just to fill out job applications.
Of course, I'm also catching up on language changes. My sister's kids have already been very busy instructing me. 
As far as missing German things, I guess I haven't been back in the US long enough for that to have really kicked in too much yet. So far I mainly miss people and also not being able to speak German. Oh, but there is one thing that I already miss at the supermarket and that is the fact that, unlike in Germany, there are shopping carts littered all over the parking lot. It's annoying. You might think you've spotted a prime parking space only to find it occupied by a shopping cart or two. And these loose shopping carts can also lead to dings and scratches on your car. In the US you don't have to put any money into the cart (except maybe at Aldi), so there isn't much incentive to return the carts to the "shopping cart corral" after you've put your groceries into the car.
Amy |
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| #3 (permalink) Wed Jan 10, 2007 14:49 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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I love the self-service checkout doohickies (whatever they're called... lanes?).
It's good to know you're safely back in los estados unidos, Amy.
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| #4 (permalink) Wed Jan 10, 2007 21:52 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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Hi Amy,
Could you tell us something about changes in the English language in Connecticut? What sort of things are your sister's children trying to teach you?
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| #7 (permalink) Sat Jan 13, 2007 8:10 am Recent changes of life in the US? |
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| Yankee wrote: | | - There is a lot more recycling done now than there was in the past. But it's still not comparable to the level of recycling done in Germany. |
I think there is as much recycling done here as in Germany, but it's less conspicuous, and it's more business than social coersion. We don't have to walk our paper and bottles down the street, because we put them in a tub in front of the house, and the recycling truck comes on garbage day to collect and separate it all. Also, many private and religious schools have big paper recycling dumpsters, and people just drop their paper in there of their own free will, because the recycling company pays the school for the paper. It's a fundraiser to benefit the school, rather than something people do because environmentalists or the government are making them feel guilty. Also, if the city doesn't pick up your batteries for recycling, there's usually a bin at the hardware store to dump them into. Motor oil is taken to most auto parts stores and recycled from there.
If you learn to recognize recycled plastic, you'll notice that most new park benches and home mail boxes of the old rural type are made of it now. So are many garbage cans.
I'm now thinking back to the 1980s when I'd go to Germany, drink a can of pop and then find out there was nowhere to put it but in the regular garbage can. In Michigan I could have taken it back to the store and gotten a dime for it, and the store would have recycled it, but in Germany I'd ask people where to recycle the can -- or even batteries -- and they'd look at me like I was from Mars.
| Yankee wrote: | | I've noticed a number of changes at supermarkets in particular. Paying for groceries at the supermarket can now be done without a cashier (self check-out systems). |
In your choice of at least two languages.
| Yankee wrote: | | You can also pay for your groceries using a debit card (which I'd never seen prior to moving to Germany). I still remember the days when you could only pay with cash or a check. |
But certainly 17 years ago we had debit cards! C'mon! The difference now is that the debit cards are issued by Visa and Mastercard, and you have a choice of choosing "debit" or "credit" when you use them. If you choose "debit", you pay the transaction fee. If you choose "credit", the retailer does.
| Yankee wrote: | | In the local supermarket here, there is even a monitor and keyboard that is used just to fill out job applications. |
That's the procedure in almost all retail stores now. Sometimes they don't have a computer terminal to take the application, but they just give you the URL to their application page on the Internet. This is because people now need more than basic computer skills in any retail job now, so making people apply online saves the employer the effort of finding out whether the applicant can use a computer.
| Yankee wrote: | | And these loose shopping carts can also lead to dings and scratches on your car. |
Not anymore, because most of the shopping carts are made of plastic, and the the few metal parts don't extend far enough out or up to ding the car. Besides, shopping carts don't usually cause scratches or dings on cars. Most of the time those are caused by the driver who hits the shopping cart.
| Yankee wrote: | | In the US you don't have to put any money into the cart (except maybe at Aldi), |
ONLY at Aldi do you have to pay money to use the shopping cart. That's just one more reason most Americans hate the place. They also won't let you use a credit card, and if you use a debit card, YOU have to pay the transaction fee. It makes Aldi look like it's run by petty chislers, and gives it a bad reputation. Aldi is the SMART car of grocery retailing.
| Yankee wrote: | | so there isn't much incentive to return the carts to the "shopping cart corral" after you've put your groceries into the car. |
In fact, even the "shopping cart corral" didn't exist until about 10 years ago, if that long. The procedure was always either to take your cart back to the wall of the store, or just to leave it somewhere where it won't bother anybody. That procedure existed because of the other incentive for not taking your cart back: There is always an employee patroling the parking lot for carts and taking them back. Their pretty efficient at it, too. Usually it's a teenager, but at my neighborhood supermarket the guy who takes the carts back used to be a manager of thousands of people right under a government minister in Albania. I asked him if this doesn't feel like a letdown to him, but he said he'd much rather collect shopping carts at Kroger's than be back in a powerful government position in his home country. That's another strange thing about America -- you never know who anyone is just from looking at them! Anyway, because of more thorough customer service, Americans have never been trained to return their shopping carts, so they don't (except for the "German" acting ones like me). |
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| #8 (permalink) Sat Jan 13, 2007 8:24 am Recent changes of life in the US? |
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Amy, unless you teach at college here, you may end up missing another change in American society. Some American college students are now something like the radical leftists from the 1960s, but with one major difference. The '60s radicals tended to want to tell the truth all the time, and they expected truth from other people. Certainly many of the things they believed were lies, distortions, disinformation or just na?ve, but if they found out something was false, they tended to reassess their belief in it and their trust in the person or institution who told the lie.
I've noticed in that the radical leftist students in my classes now don't think this way. They will actually admit something was a lie, then say that its truth or falsehood doesn't matter, and that the only thing that matters is whether the lie makes a "valid point". I have actually had students say things to me like, "Yes, of course the report was all falsified, but its idea was correct!" Some people call this the "fake but true" argument, and I never encountered it until a few years ago. Now you sometimes even hear commentators on TV using it.
Republicans and people right of them have their own quirks, but for some reason I only observe the "fake but true" argument coming from Democrats and people farther left. It you pay attention to the news programs, you'll notice it. |
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| #9 (permalink) Sat Jan 13, 2007 14:22 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Yankee wrote: | | You can also pay for your groceries using a debit card (which I'd never seen prior to moving to Germany). I still remember the days when you could only pay with cash or a check. |
But certainly 17 years ago we had debit cards! C'mon! The difference now is that the debit cards are issued by Visa and Mastercard, and you have a choice of choosing "debit" or "credit" when you use them. If you choose "debit", you pay the transaction fee. If you choose "credit", the retailer does. |
Hi Jamie
No, really! I first encountered the use of debit cards when I moved to Germany. At the time, the use of credit cards in American supermarkets was still relatively new and paying for groceries with a credit card was nowhere near as universally possible as it appears to be today. But, of course, just about any other type of store accepted at least MC and Visa (credit, not debit cards) 17 years ago.
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You have a point about the recycling being less conspicuous. Here in Connecticut, the non-recyclable garbage is picked up twice a week, every week.
When I lived in Germany, I had a myriad of containers at home for various forms of recyclable garbage. And the "regular" (non-recyclable) garbage was only picked up once every two weeks. In the part of Germany where I lived, the basic annual fee for garbage collection only included four pick-ups per year. There are chips embedded in the garbage cans and after you use up your four pick-ups, you are charged for each additional pick-up.
My suspicion always was that much of the "recyclable" stuff I so painstakingly separated in Germany ultimately ended up being dumped or burned together with much of the other stuff it had been separated from.
But I have to say that you're much more likely to find beverages in returnable glass bottles in Germany than in the US. Anything sold in cans or bottles is either returnable (and you get a deposit back) or it is to be recycled. Since bottles and cans tend to take up lots of space in a garbage can, and "non-recyclable" garbage is picked up so infrequently and it costs more if you have multiple garbage cans and/or put your garbage out for every pick-up, Germans are pretty religious about recycling beverage containers.
On the other hand, it can be very annoying trying to get your deposit back for a bottle or can in Germany. If you try to return a bottle or can to a store that doesn't sell that particular brand, it's quite possible they will refuse to take it. So, it literally pays to remember where you bought your beverage.
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| #10 (permalink) Sat Jan 13, 2007 15:58 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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| Yankee wrote: | | No, really! I first encountered the use of debit cards when I moved to Germany. At the time, the use of credit cards in American supermarkets was still relatively new and paying for groceries with a credit card was nowhere near as universally possible as it appears to be today. But, of course, just about any other type of store accepted at least MC and Visa (credit, not debit cards) 17 years ago. |
Maybe my memory is failing me, but it seems to me that 17 years ago in Detroit we could pay with plastic everywhere. (That's because Aldi hadn't arrived yet!  )
Would some of you guys quit putting a dot between your paragraphs?! It's really annoying, and it makes slightly more work when we need to quote you!
| Yankee wrote: | | You have a point about the recycling being less conspicuous. Here in Connecticut, the non-recyclable garbage is picked up twice a week, every week. |
And when I need to recycle something here, I just put it in front of my house, or I take it to some logical location when I happen to go there (batteries to the hardware store, motor oil to the auto parts store, etc.).
| Yankee wrote: | | When I lived in Germany, I had a myriad of containers at home for various forms of recyclable garbage. |
This is very German!
| Yankee wrote: | | In the part of Germany where I lived, the basic annual fee for garbage collection only included four pick-ups per year. There are chips embedded in the garbage cans and after you use up your four pick-ups, you are charged for each additional pick-up. |
I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read this! This is absolutely hilarious, and SO GERMAN! It reminds me of the radio police in Germany who run around detecting whether people are using unreported radios and TVs in their homes and evading the tax on radios and TVs (a tax that doesn't exist in the States). That it so hilariously gestapoish to Americans!
I think the American obsession is not with making sure people follow the rules, but with making sure all the garbage gets out of the neighborhood.
| Yankee wrote: | | But I have to say that you're much more likely to find beverages in returnable glass bottles in Germany than in the US. |
You must be in a state where pop and beer bottles are not returnable. In Michigan every container for a carbonated beverage is returnable for a dime (there are special machines at the supermarkets for this), and those that are not returnable can be put out by the curb for recycling on garbage day. So theoretically all beverage containers are recyclable here.
Because beverage containers have a 10? deposit, one minor form of charity at inner city colleges and universities (which turns out not to be minor for the motivated recipient) is for students and instructors to leave their returnable beverage containers in the classrooms after class has finished for the poor to collect them. At Wayne State University, there are poor people who unobtrusively enter the classroom after the students have left, and retrieve the containers. Then you can see them headed for the store with big bags containing as much as $100 worth of them to return.
That's another change in the US: University students now frequently drink water, juice, pop or coffee during class, and even eat during the lectures. That was NEVER done when I was an undergraduate student, but by the time I was in graduate school, it had become common. I think it started with night students who had to rush from work right to class, and then it spread to all students. When I was a student, I found this eating and drinking very rude and disrespectful to the professor. I thought, "I can jam something down my throat in two or three minutes in the car before class, so they should too." Then I became a professor and found that not only didn't this eating and drinking bother me at all, but most of the time I didn't even notice when people were doing it.
| Yankee wrote: | | On the other hand, it can be very annoying trying to get your deposit back for a bottle or can in Germany. If you try to return a bottle or can to a store that doesn't sell that particular brand, it's quite possible they will refuse to take it. So, it literally pays to remember where you bought your beverage. |
I think that in Michigan all retailers have to take back the bottles for every product they sell -- even if the don't sell that particular size or shape of bottle. I think most of the stores make it easy on themselves and take back the bottles and cans from any product that is carried by their distributor. Since most distributors carry almost everything, then you can take almost anything to almost any big store. The challenge arises with bottles from the more exotic foreign beers. Becks and Heineken bottles can be returned almost anywhere. Things get more problematic when you have bottles from Kirin, Tsing Tao or Pilsner Urquell. |
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| #11 (permalink) Sat Jan 13, 2007 18:20 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: |
Would some of you guys quit putting a dot between your paragraphs?! It's really annoying, and it makes slightly more work when we need to quote you! |
That particular "free-standing" dot was completely unintentional, Jamie -- which must have been obvious based on the fact that there weren't any free-standing dots inserted anywhere else.  But I do understand how they might end up being inserted unintentionally. On some forums, an empty line between paragraphs is automatically eliminated unless there has been something inserted on it. A period is usually the least conspicuous way of maintaining the formatting.
| Jamie (K) wrote: | | You must be in a state where pop and beer bottles are not returnable. In Michigan every container for a carbonated beverage is returnable for a dime (there are special machines at the supermarkets for this), and those that are not returnable can be put out by the curb for recycling on garbage day. So theoretically all beverage containers are recyclable here. |
Connecticut has a similar deposit system. I believe the deposit is five cents instead of ten, though.
http://dep.state.ct.us/wst/recycle/bbfaq.htm
The point I was making in my post was specifically about glass bottles. There are many more beverages sold in glass bottles in Germany than in the US. People frequently buy the beverage (soda/pop, water, beer) by the case and there is a deposit on each glass bottle as well as the case itself. Many plastic bottles also have deposits (and are sold by the case. It's more common to buy beverages by the case in cans in the US. |
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| #12 (permalink) Sat Jan 27, 2007 15:39 pm Recent changes of life in the US? |
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I've just noticed for the first time that the title of this thread is funny!
Amy, have you noticed a lot of Americans going through the change of life since you've been back? |
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| #14 (permalink) Mon Jan 29, 2007 0:55 am Recent changes of life in the US? |
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Hi Jamie and Amy, what exactly is so funny about the title of this thread?
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| #15 (permalink) Mon Jan 29, 2007 1:01 am Recent changes of life in the US? |
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| Torsten wrote: | | Hi Jamie and Amy, what exactly is so funny about the title of this thread? |
"The change of life" is a euphemism for menopause.
To avoid the pun, the preposition "in" or "to" could be used instead of "of". |
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