The pals who make Pals
How one local business took on the multinationals and... won?
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend brought to you by Coffee Supreme. The best part of my week was probably getting lowered in a small metal cage down a big hole which will form part of the Central Interceptor wastewater pipe in Auckland. It gave me a renewed appreciation for all the work of digging and paving and harvesting and maintaining that lets me have electricity and clean beaches to swim at and buses to ride and all those good things, many of which I intend to enjoy this weekend. All right, we’ve got gondolas, Gaza and, er, RTDs to glug (if you’re doing Crate Day please be safe and sensible), let’s get on with it!
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
The inside story of Pals, the little RTD that did it so wrong and got it so right
This morning, Duncan Greive has written a longform business story about the origin story of Pals RTDs. I asked him about the background to the story: “I went to a baby shower in October of 2019, and one of the guests had brought along this new RTD product he’d just created. It was crisp, refreshing and I didn’t think much more about it,” he said. “But by the end of the summer, Pals seemed to be everywhere – and that growth has only supercharged since. I asked around about it, and everything I heard seemed fascinating: it was wholly independent, founded by a group of friends, and its success had apparently prompted an enormous new canning plant to be built in Glen Innes. But no one had ever told its story – largely because the founders didn’t want it told. I kept chipping away and finally convinced them to let me tell it in June. I’ve been in touch on and off ever since, and they gave me access to whatever I wanted to tell what is, I think, a much more complex story than it might appear.”
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Fund a tax break with this one simple trick
Last Friday, the new government said that it would reverse the much-heralded “generational smoking ban” to pay for tax cuts. It gave Tara Ward, who has never met a tax cut she didn’t want to stuff into her pipe and smoke, an idea. “If the average tax cut for a full-time minimum-wage earner is up to $20 per fortnight, then that taxpayer will only have to save for one month to afford a $38 pack of cigarettes, or six weeks if they also fancy a lovely box of matches to light them with. That cigarette purchase will then fund the tax cuts (higher income earners could get up to $250 a fortnight, and they’re less likely to smoke), which we can then use to buy more cigarettes, which then funds our tax cuts. See? It’s the circular economy at its finest.” She explains the full scheme (satirically) here.
Number of the week: 1917, in Gaza
Sociology researcher Scott Hamilton writes about New Zealand troops’ shameful involvement in the 1917 destruction of Gaza, as part of the British government’s attempt to capture Palestine as a distraction from the Western Front. He writes: “For most Anzacs, the inhabitants of Palestine – the Arabs of the villages and towns, the nomadic Bedouin of the deserts, the small and ancient Jewish communities in towns like Jerusalem – were at best an inconvenience, and at worst a reminder of the decadence and evil condemned in the Old Testament. New Zealander Alexander McNeur summed up a widespread feeling when he wrote ‘no wonder the old inhabitants of Palestine had to be destroyed… many a chap is disgusted by the people’.”
Remembering David Bowie’s 1983 show at Western Springs
The Spinoff’s big idea, your help and how it’s going
A week ago we launched our What's eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. We’ve just passed the $33k mark, and we couldn’t be more grateful to the hundreds of people who have supported this project so far. Thank you. It’s all or nothing with PledgeMe and we need to hit our first goal of $50,000. So many of our rewards have sold out, we’ve just added three brand new ones including exclusive tips on creating a dating profile from our resident expert Madeleine Holden, tickets to our 10th birthday party next year, and a custom Spinoff homepage. Please support the campaign if you can and get your hands on some tasty rewards.
The Vintner’s Luck is still magical 25 years later
The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox’s first novel to be published outside New Zealand, was released in 1998. Now, 25 years later, books editor Claire Mabey and Knox have written a reflection on the novel about a French winemaker and the angel who visits him. “The Vintner’s Luck is one of the greatest works of imaginative faith in Aotearoa’s literary history. I first read it in my early twenties and for months afterward wrote terrible poetry about fallen angels, and strange, found feathers. I still daydream, regularly, of Knox’s Hell: a shadowy place piled with books and where Xas, the angel of the story, gardens darkly,” Claire told me. The full piece includes Knox describing the rhythm of writing and life around her as she penned the story.
Another possibly magical idea: in 25 years, will the Auckland skyline be filled with gondolas?
‘The dating apps are messing with my head. Help me, Hera!’
The Spinoff’s advice columnist tackles a question from someone trying to figure out the social norms of dating apps with her typical exuberant wisdom. “The biggest anxiety, which has haunted every generation since time immemorial, is how to act. When to text. When to play it cool. Whether or not to send a personalised gift basket to their house the next day. So often, we obsess over the little things: worrying that bringing someone flowers or asking them out twice in one week is going to come off as creepy and eager. But the truth is, if you meet someone you really like and they feel the same, it’s almost impossible to fuck it up. Even if you’re just getting to know each other.”
Venturing into dating apps? Editor Maddie Holden’s dating tips are among the rewards for supporting our Pledge Me campaign
Everything else
The COP28 climate conference has started. Here are two useful explainers about key terms and what it could achieve.
Tory Whanau, Nicola Young and the rumour that overtook the story
With his signature City-to-Sea bridge in Wellington under threat, a new book about visionary architect Rewi Thompson is timely
Sometimes, it’s OK to switch off the news, a counsellor writes
If you’ve ever been accused of being indecisive just remember that uncertainty is good for you
What an indigenous approach to tourism could look like
Why does the internet love big families so much?
Crafty weekend activity idea: making cards for people in prison
Jesse Mulligan discusses his reading diet
It’s so hard to experience the devastation of the Israel-Hamas war from the other side of the world. This story about two brothers killed in airstrikes is deeply tragic and very human, about the limitations of healthcare in a system of violence
Podcast corner: Gone by Lunchtime and the Weet-bix coalition
An essay about Germany’s obsession with making and using cars
Loved some of the behind-the-scenes science photos in this story about ants learning to navigate
Weekend beverage idea? This hyper-caffeinated canned coffee ranking
Māori and Pasifika doctors are done being asked to justify their so-called ‘privilege’, writes Emma Wehipeihana
