Google Ads once again separates the chaff from the wheat and brings us beggarbags.com, an online business selling non-perishable food parcels to give to the homeless. At first this seems like an embarrassingly roundabout way to give homeless people mail-ordered gum and Slim Jims, while skimming a little bit off for the middleman. We’re warned not to cut out that middleman and give money directly to the beggar, “because you’re not so sure he’ll buy food with the money you give him.”
But because the homeless have such dirty hands, each bag also contains a package of Purell wipes, containing 62% ethanol by volume, enough to make a normally mild-mannered prisoner ‘red-eyed,’ ‘loony’ and ‘combative’ and ‘lecturing everyone about life,’ according to the New England Journal of Medicine. Undoubtedly aware of the practice of drinking hand sanitizer and hoping to mitigate its harm, beggarbags.com decided to include Purell, one of the only non-toxic brands on the market. A thoughtful — or at the same time perhaps very thoughtless — gesture.
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