Good To Have

Have you seen the movie, Blackberry? It’s about, wait for it, the Blackberry. As in: the first smartphone.

What does this have to do with batteries? After all, it’s not like cell phones ever ran on a couple double-As, even the ones from yesteryear.

No, the relation to this sale is far more tenuous than that.

In the movie, when the iPhone is released, the BlackBerry guys are adamant it won’t hurt them. After all, their phones feature a real keyboard, and people love the tactile feel of pressing actual buttons.

It’s a film about hubris, about perfectionism, and about how capitalism breeds an excess of the former while rendering the latter impossible, and this moment perfectly encapsulates that.

And yet, this keyboard bit? I think about it whenever the batteries die in my Roku remote.

It’s not the disaster it might’ve been years ago. All I need to do is pull up the Roku app on my phone and connect to my stick. In many ways, this proves the superior browsing method. It provides shortcuts to my most used apps and a keyboard appears whenever I need to search for something.

But it just doesn’t feel right, you know? It just doesn’t feel as good as pushing REAL buttons!

Hence why I should have a stash of batteries on hand at all times. And so should you. For your remote or whatever you need them for.

Like these from the Better Battery Company, for example.

What makes them better? Two things:

1. They come in nifty, well-organized battery boxes. The boxes are recyclable and/or reusable; you can toss them in with the cans and bottles and cardboard when you’re done or load them up with other batteries as you use the ones that came in them.

And…

2. Speaking of recycling, the batteries themselves have a built-in recycling program. Just load the used ones into the included envelope and ship them back to Better Battery to take care of. This program, by the way, makes the Better Battery Company the first carbon-neutral battery company.

Cool, right?

But at the end of the day, they are just batteries. And you could always use some batteries.

So buy them.