Interesting. Ice was a rare commodity in other places prior to refrigeration, and my wife's families and mine always made things from flour sacks.
Ice was uncommon prior to refrigeration excluding the very rich or the very poor who lived in areas and had the means to have sod or ice houses. In our area, you can find lakes with former ice houses run by the Tudor ice company on the shores and they’re so neat… Usually lakes off logging roads with no public access because lakes with public access had their ice houses disassembled decades ago. They look like normal houses but with no ground floor, just a basement-like pit. One of my favorite ones to visit as a kid would turn into this little pond with its own ecosystem… Fish who were trapped after the vernal ponds dried up, turtles, salamanders, birds nesting in the rafters, bats sleeping above them… It was like peeking into Wonderland.
All of that ice was sent to Boston, though, saving some that was taken home by locals here and there. There are pictures and sketches from Old Home Days where dirt poor people had maple on ice despite it being August as the last of the ice went to the locals as there was too little of it to ship and they had to clean it all out and prep it for fall. We had local ice runners who filled the gaps with the Tudor ice folks by selling their ice from sod houses, and it was a weird little gold rush for our area which had a hard time with no -livestock farming.
Our area, though, had ice delivery well into the 50s and early 60s because refrigeration was uncommon thanks to lack of electricity in some remote areas through until as late as the early 70s.
As for the flour, before AP flour was a thing (brain fart so I can’t remember if that was first introduced in 1896 or 1904), flour was not sold in home use sizes and most could neither use or store the bulk bags. People would have to bring grain sacks (pre Industrial Revolution) or specially made flour sacks (post IR) to bag and take smaller home-use portions from their local general store or mill. Like, Caroline Ingalls would have rolled into the Olsen’s Mercantile with a sack to be filled by the merchant on the amount she needed. Likely she wouldn’t ask for a pound or two pounds, but for the dollar amounts worth. So, .25 flour, .10 flour, and brought it home in a reusable, small sack. Depending on where we were in the US (Appalachia basically, and coal country in the Dakotas), that practice might have gone as late as the depression. While those sacks were certainly used for clothes, more commonly it was the 50 pound sacks that people used, the empty bags from the mercantile or if the family got the big bags, not the little ones used to cart home the amount for family use.
Sorry, I’m a hardcore food history buff… I spend waaaaay too much time researching it, LoL!
Returning reusable bags is likely problematic unless they are made from cloth and are washable. That introduces the cost of laundering. Returning reusable bags is possible, but may not be cost effective.
That I can’t answer. I have a reusable bag phobia, so I definitely hear that complaint and can’t answer how it’s solved, even by our businesses.
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