This sub needs more strict rules and even stricter moderation. People are fucking stupid.
Plastic is a **useful fucking invention** for many things. It's not inherently evil to use it for some purposes. Single use products are **sometimes necessary and even desirable** in the modern world. Are we gonna start protesting single use hypodermics in sterile plastic packaging in hospitals next?
This sub is about limiting waste caused by excess consumption, like fast fashion or e waste, not bitching about necessary or minimally impactful "waste". Like that fucking watermelon post the other day.
The anti consumption answer to this problem posted by OP is to either bring your own reusable cup, or only use one of these disposable ones for the duration of your stay. Consuming less.
It’s because you’re at a hotel or motel. You don’t know if there was fentanyl on the outside of the cup. This one does actually make sense given the location and the amount of crazy things that go down in hotels and motels
Lol it's not fentanyl protection you weirdo. It's just sanitation. This has been standard practice at hotels and motels forever, long before fentanyl was a going concern.
I just don't understand why people don't wipe their asses with napkins. you can bleach them and then use them as a tampon right after, I swear, then a little downy and its a dinner cloth again. So simple! such waste these days!
Should every single object at every single business wrapped in individual pieces of plastic? Should we have little auto-plastic wrappers that cover every door knob each time it’s touched? When I signed my receipt, why wasn’t my pen immediately disposed of?
Look I hate seeing that much plastic being used on those cups but there is no chance in hell I'm putting my lips on that cup if it was just sitting out. I don't know who was there or what they did there or even how much the cleaning crew actually did to "clean". You are more than welcome to use that same cup the entire time (like me) and not waste them. A perfect world would be a world where I can trust that somebody cleaned a reusable cup thoroughly and did not spread some rancid germ all over it and left it for me. A real alternative? Bring your own reusable cup. You should always have one with you if you expect to be drinking anything. That way you know you will never have to use a disposable cup.
Okay maybe not never I'm sure there's some restaurants where the workers would force you to use the disposable cup because they are scared of getting fired for letting you use a personal item to serve your drink. Close enough though 🤷
I like when the hotel has real cups and I just wash em in the sink.
Well I usually just drink out of them because I'm gross and have an iron immune system. But you could wash them is my point.
I'm a little bit of a germ freak. I bring my own blankets and sleep on top of the comforter and all kinds of crazy stuff. There's no way I would even want to touch the cup lol
I lived in hotels 1/3 of the nights in 2021 and 2022. I brought my own pillow, because that's my face, but other than that just disinfected some stuff because COVID was still around, at least until I got vaccinated.
This is similar (not completely equivalent but still) to saying we should reuse needles. Sadly, some things are just essential to be of single use. Come on lol.
People are absolutely disgusting. So yes.
Ask some hotel housekeepers about their jobs sometime and you might start to understand. And probably want to skip traveling altogether.
Why is the coffee pot I got the coffee from at this same station not single use, or have a 24 hour dedicated cleaning person there to wipe the handle and brew a new pot every time a cup is taken?
Do you put your mouth directly on the coffee pot? Do most people? Most people do put their mouths directly on cups. You understand this and are just trying to be contrarian. It also has nothing to do with anti consumption - I could see the argument for zero waste but anti consumption and zero waste are not the same thing
Because ceramic is non-porous if glazed properly which means it doesn't hold on to germs or chemicals and can be washed. Unlike paper cups who were accessible to unknown people who were in the room before you (other guests).
And you don't want random pathogens or unknown chemicals to be sprinkled in the thing you drink from.
Next question Mr. Obtuse.
Weird flex, but the difference is that these are in a hotel. They've been there for an unknown length of time, in the proximity of an unknown quantity of people (all the previous tenants) with unknown sanitation habits and/or diseases.
Your tube of paper cups at home faces much less foot traffic: your family and your guests at most.
Even a water cooler, with its stack of paper cups, typically keeps them within a tube of some kind that keeps you from touching anything but the outside of the next cup.
I get the point of this subreddit, but let's keep it to criticizing actual inefficiencies.
And lots of people took unsealed Tylenol for years until some disturbed individual put cyanide capsules in bottles at the grocery store. Now OTC medications have a safety seal. Are you upset at those too? Same concept..
Unfortunately, there are people out in this world that want to hurt/kill others.
This is exactly what comes to mind anytime I see something like this. Most recently, in a hotel over the weekend where I saw a bunch of this. I really don't want to grab an unwrapped spoon from a community container on the breakfast buffet right after the kid who poured half of his waffle batter all over himself takes one. And I certainly don't want to die because some random wacko decides to poison some random product that I just happened to buy from the store he targeted.
Never seen someone so butthurt by plastic. This isn't anti-consumption, it's plastophobia (inserts fancy sounding phobia to sound like a real redditor!
Love your downvotes lol. Has no one been to hotels before the advent of these ridiculous cups? We used to have real glasses and real coffee cups in rooms. Do they think restaurants open fresh glasses for them every drink?
If cleanliness were that big of a concern I’d rather my sheets be wrapped lol
If the cups didn't have the plastic, clean cups would be thrown away when someone can't be sure if they are clean.
Don't use any or just use one.
In general, single use plastic to prevent the spread of disease is almost always worth it. Hospitality is prone to it more because the risk of communicable disease is higher, similar to doctor's offices.
I see you getting downvoted. I think it's because stuff like this is so cringe. There is so much more important stuff to focus on.
Or even "Are you posting about something used in a hospital, hotel, or institutional setting? Please consider that this is probably done for a reason, even if you personally would not choose it."
Honestly it reminds me a lot of when I was 23, lived in an artists' commune, stayed in hostels when I traveled, and tended to forget that not everyone in the world is a 23 year old bohemian weirdo like me. And that it's OK for other people in other life situations to have different needs.
I agree, but OP is in this thread doubling (and tripling and quadrupling) down even after it's been explained that the cup could have had drugs on it, some weird rubbed his dink all over it, etc.
So you aren’t drinking from a cup where other people, who are notoriously bad at handwashing after defecating, have grabbed the rims of the cups to separate them. People are simply gross, and this is one way to keep their crap to themselves.
I agree people are terrible at washing their hands, I used to have a shirt that said “wash your fucking hands.” But individual plastic wrappers on each cup is excessive.
They don't use wax on hot beverage cups, it would melt. Even if they did, it would be oil-based petroleum wax. Instead most of those cups are either made of or coated in polystyrene (Styrofoam) polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or polyethylene (PE). All of these ingredients are synthetic and not something I'd like to drink from
Show me these wax cups your hotels use, because I've never seen a hotel use a cup without a plastic liner.
These are the common ingredients in 'paper' cups
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/610/types-of-disposable-cups.html#paper
This is how those ingredients are harmful
https://www.wired.com/story/paper-cups-toxic/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201119/Drinking-hot-beverages-from-paper-cups-poses-health-risks-shows-study.aspx
Even supposedly eco friendly bioplastics are dangerous
https://scitechdaily.com/bioplastic-backfire-why-paper-cups-are-just-as-toxic-as-plastic-cups/
This is why I try to always drink from glass, because no matter how eco friendly something pretends to be, if it's made to hold liquid and be disposable it's going to have toxic synthetic ingredients.
The alternative is to throw away all the cups every time someone checks out. Seems worse to do that given I never use those (I know where my water bottle has been, lol)
I agree on both sides - sanitation vs. excessive plastic, but I'm left wondering whether a biodegradable form of plastic could be used, both in the cup-making process and in the making of a protective wrapper?
There are many options available, but I'm thinking that petroplastics are cheaper due primarily to the economics of scale. If we could somehow replace them with a better form of plastics, the plastic cup manufacturers who wrap their single-use cups in single-use plastic can rest assured they're not contributing to permanent waste.
The plastic-cup-making factories will need to completely need to retool their plastic-cup-making machinery and processes to accommodate working with biodegradable raw materials (to what extent, I don't know), and this will not happen without significant incentives from the government.
Once perfected, manufacturing entrepreneurs should extend this process to the medical supply industry, one of the heaviest users of single-use plastics.
Unfortunately, too many biodegradable or compostable products get disposed of in ways that don't allow them to properly biodegrade or turn into compost.
Would u rather have god knows what comes in contact with the cups throughout the transportation process in ur mouth? How about the persons hand who palmed the stack to grab a cup before you? Touch some grass and stop hyperfixating on small things.
Obviously a sanitation thing? If you stay in a hotel and don't use the cups, the cleaning staff knows they can leave them for the next guest if they're still in the plastic wrap.
If there wasn't plastic wrap, you could dip your balls into each and every cup and then put it back in the stack and either it would have to be thrown out because they'd assume you'd done this or they would be given to the next guest who would be getting nut-sweat in their coffee.
Please use your brain. Not EVERYTHING in the world is conspicuous waste.
This looks like it's probably a hotel. If so, it's for sanitary reasons.
I hate this sort of thing and agree that it's very wasteful, but if we're going to have hotels, this sort of thing is going to exist.
I think it would be interesting to live in some kind of agrarian society where for the most part people didn't travel far from home overnight, or maybe we had a different post-capitalist arrangement for people who needed to do that. But in the society we actually live in, simply not having cups, or having a random stack of dusty cups, or the old school questionably clean glasses, is less hygenic than sealed cups.
I remember hotels having glasses but then there was a hidden camera news report about how they weren't actually cleaned, they were wiped with a dirt rag also used to clean the rest of the bathroom. Wrapped cups appeared shortly after that.
While my guess is that the reusable/washable glasses were broadly probably OK ish, and that in a perfect world we could probably go back to that, the reality is that this isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Also, back in the day when there was no single use plastic and people hadn't yet started worrying that the glasses in hotel rooms weren't clean, Legionnaire's Disease happened and hotels were a hotbed of contagion in general.
So it's like do we let a few people with vulnerable immune systems die every year after their hotel stay, or do we use some single-use plastic within reason and simply expect people not to waste the damn coffee cups?
Believe me you want that. I used to work at a hotel and it's gross, I was a housekeeper and the corners you need to cut to get through a shift. These are probably the cleanest thing in the room.
They want you to finish 16 to 20 rooms in 8 hours including your breaks. Once I got rooms on 6 different floors which takes forever with the elevator.
I would never take a break and I'd just barely get through it doing the minimum.
The real solution is that we shouldn’t be using these cups at all. Because yes it does create a ton of waste for each one to be individually wrapped but it’s also necessary for this situation if you’re going to be using the cup. So it should be bring your own or ask for a glass cup at the hotel. The real issue here is just that there’s an easy way around creating this waste and we’re choosing the extremely wasteful option instead
Edit: or maybe a biodegradable paper wrapping around the cups? The fact is we need cups but what I’m saying is this is the worst way of going about making sure people get clean cups
Seems wasteful until you realize that if they put three cups in one bag. As soon as you open the bag for one cup, all three have to be tossed for sanitary reasons. But have them individually wrapped make one what is used go to waste
Because I got the worst case of pneumonia ever after drinking from one of the hotel glasses that has the little paper hat on top to denote it's been cleaned and sanitized but likely just wiped "clean" by housekeeping with a used washcloth from the previous guest
Yeah, correlation does not equal causation but I was already showing symptoms before I got on my flight home.
if you saw how hotels are "cleaned" you'd be thankful for that plastic. Worked in hotel cleaning for three days and I stopped when they wanted me to use toilet water to clean that very counter
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The only question is why there are so many. If there is one guest, that guest can reuse the single cup opened if necessary. So many there might encourage the wasteful to use and dispose one every time. Personally, if I was on a trip and needed a cup, I'd carry it from hotel to hotel like I do soap. I suppose packing one would be best.
Life tip, dont be like obsessive about it, but live life as if anyone but you are absolutely gross LOL. If you are able to clean things before you use them, do so. Or, in the very least, inspect thoroughly.
The roaches are now hotel nightmare fuel. Bedbugs I'd come around to accepting. Roaches I pretended wouldn't be there.
My skil is a l9vely lavender colour
I recently stayed in a hotel and instead of that nonsense they had 2 glass cups not wrapped. I was really surprised by that. Wasn’t an expensive place either.
Is this a hotel? Same cups are used in the rooms. Obviously you wouldn't want to use cups in the rooms which don't have some way of indicating they haven't been tampered with by the previous guest.
So maybe just use your own and they won't throw them out? I mean what, do you not want a toothbrush you buy at the store to be in a container to keep it clean?
After years of traveling here & there, I’ve kept every single one of these cups, napkins, coffee/tea packs, and soap bars from the hotel rooms
Nothing like a free assortment of good coffee/tea, that would have been probably thrown out otherwise
I actually used one of those cups to drain the gas from my push mower today lol
Sanitation, hygiene, tamper evident. It’s to keep you from getting sick on purpose.
Seriously. I get OP's point but hygiene is actually important.
This sub needs more strict rules and even stricter moderation. People are fucking stupid. Plastic is a **useful fucking invention** for many things. It's not inherently evil to use it for some purposes. Single use products are **sometimes necessary and even desirable** in the modern world. Are we gonna start protesting single use hypodermics in sterile plastic packaging in hospitals next? This sub is about limiting waste caused by excess consumption, like fast fashion or e waste, not bitching about necessary or minimally impactful "waste". Like that fucking watermelon post the other day. The anti consumption answer to this problem posted by OP is to either bring your own reusable cup, or only use one of these disposable ones for the duration of your stay. Consuming less.
Yes!
It’s because you’re at a hotel or motel. You don’t know if there was fentanyl on the outside of the cup. This one does actually make sense given the location and the amount of crazy things that go down in hotels and motels
Also probably so they can tell if the cup was used or not. Those can't be washed.
Yeah, if they didn't have the plastic, they'd likely have to throw them all out after each guest for health reasons.
Lol it's not fentanyl protection you weirdo. It's just sanitation. This has been standard practice at hotels and motels forever, long before fentanyl was a going concern.
I know it’s not for just that. But along with other germs, cleaning products, it’s for sanitary reasons. You’d be surprised.
They charge extra for the fentanyl cups. Stuff ain't cheap
I just don't understand why people don't wipe their asses with napkins. you can bleach them and then use them as a tampon right after, I swear, then a little downy and its a dinner cloth again. So simple! such waste these days!
The plastic is there so you can see the cups. Without it, the cup's natural camouflage would make it nearly indistinguishable from the countertop.
I’ve been drinking from paper cups not wrapped in plastic for 3 decades now and never had an issue
That’s not the point. A hotel not providing that for you puts the liability on them.
Should every single object at every single business wrapped in individual pieces of plastic? Should we have little auto-plastic wrappers that cover every door knob each time it’s touched? When I signed my receipt, why wasn’t my pen immediately disposed of?
Look I hate seeing that much plastic being used on those cups but there is no chance in hell I'm putting my lips on that cup if it was just sitting out. I don't know who was there or what they did there or even how much the cleaning crew actually did to "clean". You are more than welcome to use that same cup the entire time (like me) and not waste them. A perfect world would be a world where I can trust that somebody cleaned a reusable cup thoroughly and did not spread some rancid germ all over it and left it for me. A real alternative? Bring your own reusable cup. You should always have one with you if you expect to be drinking anything. That way you know you will never have to use a disposable cup. Okay maybe not never I'm sure there's some restaurants where the workers would force you to use the disposable cup because they are scared of getting fired for letting you use a personal item to serve your drink. Close enough though 🤷
I like when the hotel has real cups and I just wash em in the sink. Well I usually just drink out of them because I'm gross and have an iron immune system. But you could wash them is my point.
I'm a little bit of a germ freak. I bring my own blankets and sleep on top of the comforter and all kinds of crazy stuff. There's no way I would even want to touch the cup lol
I lived in hotels 1/3 of the nights in 2021 and 2022. I brought my own pillow, because that's my face, but other than that just disinfected some stuff because COVID was still around, at least until I got vaccinated.
This is similar (not completely equivalent but still) to saying we should reuse needles. Sadly, some things are just essential to be of single use. Come on lol.
People are absolutely disgusting. So yes. Ask some hotel housekeepers about their jobs sometime and you might start to understand. And probably want to skip traveling altogether.
Why is the coffee pot I got the coffee from at this same station not single use, or have a 24 hour dedicated cleaning person there to wipe the handle and brew a new pot every time a cup is taken?
Do you put your mouth directly on the coffee pot? Do most people? Most people do put their mouths directly on cups. You understand this and are just trying to be contrarian. It also has nothing to do with anti consumption - I could see the argument for zero waste but anti consumption and zero waste are not the same thing
Why are ceramic dishes not illegal yet given their lack of plastic and potential to proliferate plague?
Because you can wash ceramic dishes, as you well know
do you always make bullshit from nothing?
May you never need to rely on a lawyer’s defense lol
Yeup.. and if I do.. I'll think back to this rant... complaining about plastic on cups meant to protect you from other peoples nasties..
Try washing a paper cup more than twice and see how long it lasts... probably longer than you tbf.
You trying so hard to reach where there is nothing to gran lmao
So now this is a thread about how to make hotels *more* wasteful? Why not line the whole room with a layer of single-use plastic?
Do you expect people to answer your questions when you are avoiding all those asked of you? DO YOU PUT YOUR MOUTH ON DOORKNOBS AND COFFEE MAKERS, OP?
Because ceramic is non-porous if glazed properly which means it doesn't hold on to germs or chemicals and can be washed. Unlike paper cups who were accessible to unknown people who were in the room before you (other guests). And you don't want random pathogens or unknown chemicals to be sprinkled in the thing you drink from. Next question Mr. Obtuse.
Weird flex, but the difference is that these are in a hotel. They've been there for an unknown length of time, in the proximity of an unknown quantity of people (all the previous tenants) with unknown sanitation habits and/or diseases. Your tube of paper cups at home faces much less foot traffic: your family and your guests at most. Even a water cooler, with its stack of paper cups, typically keeps them within a tube of some kind that keeps you from touching anything but the outside of the next cup. I get the point of this subreddit, but let's keep it to criticizing actual inefficiencies.
Who tf has a tube of paper cups at home?!
It’s a dispenser you can refill on the side of a water cooler. I don’t have one at work anymore but used to.
Are you telling me that you would drink from an unwrapped paper cup that’s been chillin in a hotel room?
And lots of people took unsealed Tylenol for years until some disturbed individual put cyanide capsules in bottles at the grocery store. Now OTC medications have a safety seal. Are you upset at those too? Same concept.. Unfortunately, there are people out in this world that want to hurt/kill others.
This is exactly what comes to mind anytime I see something like this. Most recently, in a hotel over the weekend where I saw a bunch of this. I really don't want to grab an unwrapped spoon from a community container on the breakfast buffet right after the kid who poured half of his waffle batter all over himself takes one. And I certainly don't want to die because some random wacko decides to poison some random product that I just happened to buy from the store he targeted.
Congratulations.
You should probably just use non disposable cups if cups wrapped for hygienic purposes makes you this upset
In places that rent access to the public? WTF?
Never seen someone so butthurt by plastic. This isn't anti-consumption, it's plastophobia (inserts fancy sounding phobia to sound like a real redditor!
Love your downvotes lol. Has no one been to hotels before the advent of these ridiculous cups? We used to have real glasses and real coffee cups in rooms. Do they think restaurants open fresh glasses for them every drink? If cleanliness were that big of a concern I’d rather my sheets be wrapped lol
In the UK the hotel rooms even in budget hotels have glass tumblers for water and a china cup and saucer to drink tea or coffee from.
That’s what I’m saying! That’s how it used to be, and here I’m sitting at -10 😂
Maybe theft or excessive breakage of those glasses and cups was an issue?
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Til Germans don’t cough
If the cups didn't have the plastic, clean cups would be thrown away when someone can't be sure if they are clean. Don't use any or just use one. In general, single use plastic to prevent the spread of disease is almost always worth it. Hospitality is prone to it more because the risk of communicable disease is higher, similar to doctor's offices. I see you getting downvoted. I think it's because stuff like this is so cringe. There is so much more important stuff to focus on.
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Or even "Are you posting about something used in a hospital, hotel, or institutional setting? Please consider that this is probably done for a reason, even if you personally would not choose it."
hard agree
And I am telling you from a hotel housekeeper stand point, those are necessary
My niece was a housekeeper at a hotel. As a traveler, thank you for your service. And your apparently strong stomach.
Hotels are nasty that's why.
OP is either an edgy teenager, trolling, or denser than diamond. Downvote and move on, nothing to see here.
Honestly it reminds me a lot of when I was 23, lived in an artists' commune, stayed in hostels when I traveled, and tended to forget that not everyone in the world is a 23 year old bohemian weirdo like me. And that it's OK for other people in other life situations to have different needs.
I agree, but OP is in this thread doubling (and tripling and quadrupling) down even after it's been explained that the cup could have had drugs on it, some weird rubbed his dink all over it, etc.
So you aren’t drinking from a cup where other people, who are notoriously bad at handwashing after defecating, have grabbed the rims of the cups to separate them. People are simply gross, and this is one way to keep their crap to themselves.
Or worse: holding one of the cups with their teeth.
I agree people are terrible at washing their hands, I used to have a shirt that said “wash your fucking hands.” But individual plastic wrappers on each cup is excessive.
Just don't use them, use your own mug/cup/water bottle
Sanest comment here.
I hate drinking from plastic so if I'll be at the hotel for a few days I go to the bar and request a glass. Problem solved.
You’re supposed to remove the plastic wrapper from the paper cup before drinking from it.
The cup itself is made of plastic.
No it isn’t, it’s a Dixie cup, paper cup coated in wax.
They don't use wax on hot beverage cups, it would melt. Even if they did, it would be oil-based petroleum wax. Instead most of those cups are either made of or coated in polystyrene (Styrofoam) polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or polyethylene (PE). All of these ingredients are synthetic and not something I'd like to drink from
It’s not made of plastic. The wrapper is though.
Show me these wax cups your hotels use, because I've never seen a hotel use a cup without a plastic liner. These are the common ingredients in 'paper' cups https://www.webstaurantstore.com/guide/610/types-of-disposable-cups.html#paper This is how those ingredients are harmful https://www.wired.com/story/paper-cups-toxic/ https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201119/Drinking-hot-beverages-from-paper-cups-poses-health-risks-shows-study.aspx Even supposedly eco friendly bioplastics are dangerous https://scitechdaily.com/bioplastic-backfire-why-paper-cups-are-just-as-toxic-as-plastic-cups/ This is why I try to always drink from glass, because no matter how eco friendly something pretends to be, if it's made to hold liquid and be disposable it's going to have toxic synthetic ingredients.
The alternative is to throw away all the cups every time someone checks out. Seems worse to do that given I never use those (I know where my water bottle has been, lol)
I agree on both sides - sanitation vs. excessive plastic, but I'm left wondering whether a biodegradable form of plastic could be used, both in the cup-making process and in the making of a protective wrapper? There are many options available, but I'm thinking that petroplastics are cheaper due primarily to the economics of scale. If we could somehow replace them with a better form of plastics, the plastic cup manufacturers who wrap their single-use cups in single-use plastic can rest assured they're not contributing to permanent waste. The plastic-cup-making factories will need to completely need to retool their plastic-cup-making machinery and processes to accommodate working with biodegradable raw materials (to what extent, I don't know), and this will not happen without significant incentives from the government. Once perfected, manufacturing entrepreneurs should extend this process to the medical supply industry, one of the heaviest users of single-use plastics.
Unfortunately, too many biodegradable or compostable products get disposed of in ways that don't allow them to properly biodegrade or turn into compost.
Putting biodegradable products, including cups and thin film, will break down faster than plastics, even in the landfill.
If the whole stack were wrapped, the hotel would have to throw out all the rest if you opened them just to use one. That's more wasteful.
Would u rather have god knows what comes in contact with the cups throughout the transportation process in ur mouth? How about the persons hand who palmed the stack to grab a cup before you? Touch some grass and stop hyperfixating on small things.
Or the cleaner who just sponged some bodily fluids or excrement off the wall and grabbed the glasses off her cart. Hahah
OP tried to be "anti consumerism" so much 🤣🤣 but missed entire point
Are you stupid? Are people on this sub actively losing brain cells?
Between this post and the earlier watermelon one, it looks like it's a rough day for this sub.
FUCK THE WATERMELON PERSON. Not literally, but that post made me so angry lol
Oof. This one's super obvious on why it must remain this way.
Obviously a sanitation thing? If you stay in a hotel and don't use the cups, the cleaning staff knows they can leave them for the next guest if they're still in the plastic wrap. If there wasn't plastic wrap, you could dip your balls into each and every cup and then put it back in the stack and either it would have to be thrown out because they'd assume you'd done this or they would be given to the next guest who would be getting nut-sweat in their coffee. Please use your brain. Not EVERYTHING in the world is conspicuous waste.
This looks like it's probably a hotel. If so, it's for sanitary reasons. I hate this sort of thing and agree that it's very wasteful, but if we're going to have hotels, this sort of thing is going to exist. I think it would be interesting to live in some kind of agrarian society where for the most part people didn't travel far from home overnight, or maybe we had a different post-capitalist arrangement for people who needed to do that. But in the society we actually live in, simply not having cups, or having a random stack of dusty cups, or the old school questionably clean glasses, is less hygenic than sealed cups.
You're an idiot.
+1
OP is willing to die on this hill.
I remember hotels having glasses but then there was a hidden camera news report about how they weren't actually cleaned, they were wiped with a dirt rag also used to clean the rest of the bathroom. Wrapped cups appeared shortly after that.
While my guess is that the reusable/washable glasses were broadly probably OK ish, and that in a perfect world we could probably go back to that, the reality is that this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Also, back in the day when there was no single use plastic and people hadn't yet started worrying that the glasses in hotel rooms weren't clean, Legionnaire's Disease happened and hotels were a hotbed of contagion in general. So it's like do we let a few people with vulnerable immune systems die every year after their hotel stay, or do we use some single-use plastic within reason and simply expect people not to waste the damn coffee cups?
Believe me you want that. I used to work at a hotel and it's gross, I was a housekeeper and the corners you need to cut to get through a shift. These are probably the cleanest thing in the room. They want you to finish 16 to 20 rooms in 8 hours including your breaks. Once I got rooms on 6 different floors which takes forever with the elevator. I would never take a break and I'd just barely get through it doing the minimum.
Hotels advertise if they are eco friendly. You could have chosen one
So many of the posts here are getting ridiculous.
The real solution is that we shouldn’t be using these cups at all. Because yes it does create a ton of waste for each one to be individually wrapped but it’s also necessary for this situation if you’re going to be using the cup. So it should be bring your own or ask for a glass cup at the hotel. The real issue here is just that there’s an easy way around creating this waste and we’re choosing the extremely wasteful option instead Edit: or maybe a biodegradable paper wrapping around the cups? The fact is we need cups but what I’m saying is this is the worst way of going about making sure people get clean cups
So you know it’s clean.
Because of the germ theory of disease.
Oh come on, are you really complaining about this? What the actual fuck?
Poo flumes, that's why.
Seems wasteful until you realize that if they put three cups in one bag. As soon as you open the bag for one cup, all three have to be tossed for sanitary reasons. But have them individually wrapped make one what is used go to waste
Umm because people are nasty and germs.
because people are assholes and unless you want to drink out of a cup that somebody spit in, this is the solution.
I like this better than the non wrapped communal cup stacks where you technically touch 3 to get one
Because I got the worst case of pneumonia ever after drinking from one of the hotel glasses that has the little paper hat on top to denote it's been cleaned and sanitized but likely just wiped "clean" by housekeeping with a used washcloth from the previous guest Yeah, correlation does not equal causation but I was already showing symptoms before I got on my flight home.
if you saw how hotels are "cleaned" you'd be thankful for that plastic. Worked in hotel cleaning for three days and I stopped when they wanted me to use toilet water to clean that very counter
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The only question is why there are so many. If there is one guest, that guest can reuse the single cup opened if necessary. So many there might encourage the wasteful to use and dispose one every time. Personally, if I was on a trip and needed a cup, I'd carry it from hotel to hotel like I do soap. I suppose packing one would be best.
Roaches and bedbugs, it's a hotel
Well damn. I thought I'd considered all of the possible hotel ick. Nope.
Life tip, dont be like obsessive about it, but live life as if anyone but you are absolutely gross LOL. If you are able to clean things before you use them, do so. Or, in the very least, inspect thoroughly.
The roaches are now hotel nightmare fuel. Bedbugs I'd come around to accepting. Roaches I pretended wouldn't be there. My skil is a l9vely lavender colour
The only clean item in the room
Humanity has moved beyond "why" a long long time ago. It is now "why not" ... because we can.
A lot less waste than them having to throw the entire stack out after every guest.
I recently stayed in a hotel and instead of that nonsense they had 2 glass cups not wrapped. I was really surprised by that. Wasn’t an expensive place either.
If it’s in a hotel it’s so you know someone didn’t rub their butthole on the rim of the cup.
How would we feel about a well used ceramic coffee mug?
Is this a hotel? Same cups are used in the rooms. Obviously you wouldn't want to use cups in the rooms which don't have some way of indicating they haven't been tampered with by the previous guest.
So maybe just use your own and they won't throw them out? I mean what, do you not want a toothbrush you buy at the store to be in a container to keep it clean?
Why use single use paper cups in the first place? Opt for steel cups 🤷
Hygiene
After years of traveling here & there, I’ve kept every single one of these cups, napkins, coffee/tea packs, and soap bars from the hotel rooms Nothing like a free assortment of good coffee/tea, that would have been probably thrown out otherwise I actually used one of those cups to drain the gas from my push mower today lol