321
TIL that soda crackers were shipped in barrels, and that's where the name of the store came from
(www.tastingtable.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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Why the fuck wouldn’t you just use boxes? The goddamn crackers are square. What a waste of space.
Barrels are mostly air and water tight
Can't roll a box. The hand truck has not been invented yet.
Well I went down a rabbit hole and it turns out the first appearance of anything we'd call a hand truck looked like a hoe with wheels and was used by children working as stevedores to move heavy sacks easily, c1600's.
so...yes! We didn't have hand trucks for crates/barrels until after we had crates and barrels.
...which sounds super obvious in retrospect.
That's what I was surprised by. Maybe barrels were very common and the round shape was more resistant to stress/impacts than crates at the time? Although someone said the crackers at the bottom didn't hold up that well so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I suppose you can roll barrels, making them easier to move around. That’s the trade off for the lost space.
Because reusability.
What I want to know is why the fuck we don't just use barrels today.
i got two in my yard why don't you
Because I'm not rich enough to have a yard :/
We do. they're just bigger and more space efficient:
(And they're reused just like barrels were. That's how Walmart got all that radioactive shrimp).
Wtf. Those are crazy inefficient.
Sail boats are infinitely more efficient.
Majority of products in your apartment/house come from cargo ships.
Yeah, that's a problem. We need to make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive so that more efficient systems like sail boats become the primary transport
Round containers aren't ideal for transportation, for one. Square fits into square with no gaps. Hexagons fit together with no gaps but they don't fit into squares without gaps
Round containers are more durable.
We learned this lesson in the Spanish American War, where the major cause of death was food poisoning from meats in square cans
The jokes below are great, but the real reason is that barrels are water tight and crates aren't. Crackers and tack have a shelf life of centuries if you don't get them wet but are instantly destroyed by mild moisture. If you're transporting them over sea or across the frontier it's just common sense to keep them in the waterproof container.
Because the square barrel was not that successful
I think it’s called a crate. I’m pretty sure they are a thing that exists.
No no I'm talking about something made of wood like a barrel but square, like you could stack them.
They did actually invent square barrels at one point but they fell out of use shortly afterward because they were much harder to roll than regular barrels.
That’s why square joints never became popular.
They used cheap busted beer barrels that the breweries chucked out.