I recently interviewed a Life Story Magic customer who grew up working in her family’s general store in the 1930s. One detail stuck with me: her family bought goods in bulk and packaged individual portions only when customers came in.
For example, if a customer wanted cheese, they’d cut a slice from a giant wheel of cheese.
Or if customers wanted grain, they’d scoop out the amount they wanted from a giant bag and put it in a smaller one.
Oh, and for beer — customers came in with their own containers, and they’d fill them from a giant barrel.
No boxes of cereal with cartoon characters, no “settling of contents may occur” and of course, no “best before” date on the packages.
I don’t know what it would have been like to be a customer then, but I suspect I might at least have assumed that the food was fresh.
A proxy for naturalness?
Today, some shoppers are using shelf life as a shortcut to judge how natural their food is. The shorter the shelf life, the thinking goes, the less processed the product.
But that’s a bit of a mistake, Yann Cornil, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, told me recently.
Cornil and two colleagues, Dan Liu and Xiaobing Xu, published research in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in which they presented participants with products that were similar except for their shelf lives:
Potato chips with 5-month and 9-month shelf lives;
Pasta sauces with 1-year and 3-year shelf lives;
Granola bars with nearly identical ingredients and nutrition information but different shelf lives;
Mayonnaise, where the longer shelf life came from a better seal on the jar.
By and large, participants rated food products with shorter shelf lives as more natural.
They also rated the products with longer shelf lives as better for the environment, because they seemed less likely to go to waste.
And in some of the experiments, the ingredients and nutritional quality were nearly identical. In others, a longer shelf life simply meant better packaging.
Cornil acknowledged that it’s hard for consumers to judge how natural food really is. But he offered one suggestion:
“Having a look at the ingredient list is probably more diagnostic than having a look at the shelf life.”
How about rotisserie chickens?
I’ve mentioned this one before, but it seems relevant.
Researchers at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business wanted to figure out the best way to sell rotisserie chickens in grocery stores.
Result: a 35-page academic paper with a 50-page online appendix, built around a mathematical model that pointed to a surprisingly simple approach.
Stop showing preparation dates on chickens. Instead, sell the freshest ones first: last-in, first-out (LIFO).
(The catch: in their model, reducing waste also required stores to keep chickens on the shelf longer.)
If you put preparation dates on chickens, shoppers can compare them and gravitate toward the most recently cooked ones, even if the others are nearly as good.
According to the model, the average quality of the chickens sold goes up. More people buy them, and the store ultimately throws less food away — even though some individual chickens wind up expiring before they’re sold.
Anyway, I keep thinking about that barrel of beer at the general store.
I’d kind of like to try showing up at my local grocery store with a mug and asking them to fill it and see what happens.
If word got out, it might be the most popular market around.
I wonder it people would assume it was fresh.
Other things worth knowing …
Miami Herald: Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued a 53-page report Monday alleging that five women have accused President Donald Trump of rape or sexual assault while in the company of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, or shortly after meeting the men together, decades before his presidency. The Committee presented at least one new allegation: a former Miss Switzerland who says she Trump raped her at the Plaza Hotel in New York during a beauty pageant in 1993, leaving her bleeding and bruised. The White House denied the allegation.
USA Today | CNN: Trump broke his own record for “longest Truth Social” post with an attack on Bill Maher, host of “Real Time,” in a lengthy and emotional rant. Total length of the post: 1,323 words about the length of this newsletter.
NBC News: Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic on Monday unveiled its public IPO filing ahead of what is expected to be one of the largest stock debuts in history. That offering, widely expected to come sometime in mid-November, could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion.
TMZ: Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has a new app called Dazzle AI, drew attention after explaining that she needed an AI assistant to help her describe her own 9-year-old daughter. During a recent NYT interview, Mayer cited a 2025 incident in she needed to use Dazzle to come up with “three descriptive words that showed how special her daughter was” for a school project. Dazzle came up with “empathetic,” “creative,” and “animal lover.”
CNN: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became Brazil’s first president to win a fourth term Sunday, and he did so days before turning 81. Since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, no president had managed to overturn a first-round defeat.
Hollywood Reporter | People: Two deaths in Hollywood to report: Walter Koenig, the boyish actor who portrayed Star Trek’s Russian crewman Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90. Also, Eric Bauza, the Emmy Award-winning voice actor known for Looney Tunes’ characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety and Porky Pig, has died. He was 46.
Space.com: In a new study, researchers suggest that they’ve figured out the exact night depicted in the Vincent Van Gogh painting, “The Starry Night,” July 22, 1889. Letters written by Van Gogh as early as 1888 describe his desire to paint a star-filled sky.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!